Project History

The CGAL project started in 1996 as a consortium of seven sites in Europe and Israel. It didn't start from scratch as several project partners brought in their experience from internal projects, as PlaGeo and SpaGeo from Utrecht University, the geometry part of LEDA which at that time was still an academic project at the Max-Planck-Institute, and C++GAL developed at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis.

License

The project started in 1996 as a closed consortium of seven research institutes and had an academic license, which stated that when you are in academia you could use CGAL freely. In January 2003 the GeometryFactory was founded, offering commercial licenses for CGAL. In November 2003 the project adopted an Open Source license, and in October 2005 it published CGAL Open Source Project Rules and Procedures in order to help users and developers to understand the decision processes behind CGAL and how one can get involved.

Funding by European Research Programs

CGAL - CGAL has been originally funded by European Union's information technologies programme Esprit, by Project 21957 - CGAL, with the project partners Utrecht University (The Netherlands), ETH Zurich (Switzerland), Freie Universitaet Berlin (Germany), INRIA Sophia-Antipolis (France), Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg (Germany), Max-Planck-Institute Saarbruecken (Germany), RISC Linz (Austria), and Tel-Aviv University (Israel). The project started in October 1996 and had a duration of 21 months.

GALIA - It was followed by Project 28155 - GALIA, with the same project partners, but RISC Linz. The project started in November 1998 and had a duration of 18 months.

ECG - The Project IST-2000-26473 - ECG, with the project partners ETH Zurich (Switzerland), Groningen University (The Netherlands), Freie Universitaet Berlin (Germany), INRIA Sophia-Antipolis (France), Max-Planck-Institute Saarbruecken (Germany), and Tel-Aviv University (Israel), contributed partially, because there was a stronger focus on research than on development. The project started in May 2001 and had a duration of 36 months.

ACS - Following ECG, the above project partners, together with GeometryFactory (France) and University of Athens (Greece), worked together in Project IST-006413 - ACS on several new CGAL packages. The project started in June 2005 and had a duration of 36 months.

Aim@Shape - Additionnaly, the Aim@Shape European Network of Excellence provided some ressources to support the development of CGAL, among many other geometry related projects, such as the shape repository and the tools repository. The project started in 2004 for a duration of 48 months.

About the Logo

See here for information about the CGAL logo construction.