OpenCourant ships first builds after OpenRadioss shutdown
The community fork of OpenRadioss has published its first automated builds, four days after Siemens discontinued the project and deleted its repository.
OpenCourant, the project that picked up the OpenRadioss code base after Siemens pulled it down, has published its first automated builds — and it had to rebuild the release pipeline from the ground up to do it.
The pipeline did not survive the shutdown
The project says the delivery infrastructure it inherited was gone along with everything else. It had leaned on an internal container registry, self-hosted runners, a private binary repository and a second private source repository, none of which came with the code. OpenCourant rebuilt the pipeline on its own infrastructure and its own CI images, and the regression suite now runs as a gate before packaging, so a build that fails its checks is never published. The anim_to_vtk and th_to_csv converters, which used to arrive as prebuilt binaries from a repository that no longer exists, are now compiled from source as part of the same pipeline.
A community member had the missing library
OpenRadioss depended on a proprietary input-reader library that was never committed to git, and when the upstream repositories disappeared, so did it. The newest copies anyone could recover from public sources were months older than the rest of the code base expected. OpenCourant asked whether anyone still had one. A community member had archived the original package, and the project verified it against an independently recovered binary of the same build before adopting it as the reader in every Linux build it ships. The starter also goes back to using the solver's native part API instead of a compatibility fallback.
What shipped, and what is still missing
The first release is tagged latest-20261005. It is a stable Linux x86-64 package, compiled from source, roughly 80 MiB, with the project reporting 81 of 81 MiniQA checks passing and the H3D output test writing six frames. Windows and Linux arm64 builds are not ready: the Windows target needs runners, the Intel oneAPI toolchain and open replacements for vendor-internal build dependencies, while arm64 is blocked on a reader binary that may not exist in public hands at all. The /ALE/STRUCTURED_MESH feature remains unsupported and is rejected explicitly rather than silently producing bad meshes.
OpenRadioss was discontinued by Siemens on 1 October 2026. Its website was retired and its GitHub repository — four years of community development on the open-source version of the Radioss finite element solver, which Altair had published in 2022 — was removed without an archive. The code had been released under the GNU AGPL v3, and OpenCourant continues from the last available open-source base. The project takes its name from Richard Courant and the Courant–Friedrichs–Lewy condition, the stability criterion that governs explicit time-integration solvers.
Our opinion
The reassuring version of this story is that a licence like the AGPL makes a shutdown like Siemens' impossible. The real version is that the licence preserved only the code, and everything else the project needed — the containers, the runners, the binary repository, and a proprietary reader library that had somehow never been committed — was never public to begin with. OpenCourant got lucky in the most literal sense: one person happened to keep a tarball. That is not a governance model, it is a raffle, and the project says as much itself when it admits arm64 may be unbuildable because nobody recovered the file. The rebuild deserves credit for being fast and for publishing its gaps rather than its wins alone, but the more useful lesson is about what a repository actually contains. Deleting a repo does not delete a project's dependencies; it just moves them somewhere darker. Four days to a working pipeline is genuinely impressive. Four years of contribution resting on one stranger's archive is the part worth remembering.
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