Siemens ends community-driven OpenRadioss development, steering users to Simcenter

Siemens closes the open chapter for Radioss

Siemens has ended community-driven development of OpenRadioss, the open-source track of its Radioss explicit dynamics solver. According to an announcement on the company's Simcenter site, which surfaced on the Hacker News front page, the decision concludes four years of what Siemens describes as successful community-driven research. The company frames the change as a consolidation: future investment will be concentrated inside the Simcenter portfolio so it can move faster and give global users dependable support for production-level simulation work.

Two tracks replace one public project

The notice lays out two destinations for former OpenRadioss users. The first is Simcenter Radioss, the flagship commercial product, positioned as the path for production simulation. Siemens says it offers the full explicit solver with dedicated support, curated material libraries and tight integration into the broader Simcenter ecosystem.

The second is the newly launched Simcenter Radioss R&D Program (SCRDP), aimed at academic and industrial partners. Siemens characterizes it as a managed Shared Source environment: interested organizations must apply, and approved partners then work directly with Siemens development teams through joint development projects, technical guidance and peer reviews. Members gain access to the Simcenter Radioss source code and a private high-performance computing environment for advanced research, and the company says participants will have a hand in shaping where the solver goes next.

The distinction matters. Shared source is not open source. Code access is granted to vetted collaborators under terms the vendor controls, rather than being published in a public repository that anyone can inspect, extend and redistribute. In effect, the open community that formed around the solver is being replaced by an invitation-only partner program.

What the announcement leaves unanswered

The notice does not say what becomes of the existing OpenRadioss codebase — whether current public repositories and past releases stay available, and under what license, or whether the last four years of community contributions feed back into the commercial product. It also does not detail the conditions partners accept when joining the SCRDP, such as how intellectual property from joint work is handled. Researchers interested in the program are directed to apply through Siemens.

Why it matters

Major industrial simulation solvers are almost never developed in the open, which made OpenRadioss a reference point for open simulation software. Ending the community track narrows the options for researchers, students and smaller engineering firms that relied on a no-cost, modifiable explicit dynamics code, and pushes them toward either a commercial license or a gated program whose rules Siemens sets.

The reversal also fits a familiar pattern in corporate open source: an open phase that builds engagement and gathers external feedback, followed by consolidation back into proprietary channels once momentum is established. For the simulation community, the open question is whether independent forks of the existing OpenRadioss code can sustain themselves without vendor backing — something Siemens' announcement does not address.