Open Source Software

Starting with the free software movement in 1983 led by Richard Stallman of the GNU project to the Open Source Initiative in 1998, open-source software has proven to be "a superior model for software development" (Stallman, 2014). Today there are thousands of active open source projects including commonly used applications like Firefox OS and Twitter's Bootstrap. Apart from the general applications that I have listed, there are many specialized codes to suite different all fields of study. Specifically for the aeronautical community, there is a new developmental open source software tool entitled Stanford University Unstructured (SU2). This application is a great tool for all aeronautical and aerospace students because it is able to model the effects of fluids moving over aerodynamic surfaces at zero cost to the end user.

What is it?

SU2 OSS "is a collection of C++ software tools that are set to perform complex Partial Differential Equation (PDE) analysis for solving PDE optimization problems in order to achieve optimal shape design" (SU2, n.d.). SU2 meets the criteria of an open source software application because "programmers are able to read, redistribute, and modify the source code" (Marakas & O'Brien, 2013) in order to perform computational fluid dynamics, or CFD. Like all OSS, SU2 is copyrighted by the Aerospace Design Laboratory and allows, and even encourages distribution and modification of the source code to anyone and everyone. According to Amrita Lonkar, a doctoral candidate at Stanford University, “[SU2] was really easy to modify for my research. For me, it reduced about a year’s worth of work to just four months" (Myers, 2012). This is due to the fact that this software incorporates everything that an engineer would need in order to completely model aerodynamic surfaces such as fuselages, hulls, propellers, wings, rotors, rockets and re-entry vehicles, making it easier for students to focus on creating better aerodynamic designs instead...