OpenFOAM

OpenFOAM is the leading free, open source software for CFD, owned by the OpenFOAM Foundation and distributed exclusively under the General Public Licence (GPL). The GPL gives users the freedom to modify and redistribute the software and a guarantee of continued free use, within the terms of the licence.

OpenFOAM was created by Henry Weller in 1989 under the name “FOAM” and was released open source as “OpenFOAM” by Henry Weller, Chris Greenshields and Mattijs Janssens in December 2004. Since then, OpenFOAM has continued to be managed and developed with new versions being released to the public each year. The current version is 5.0. In 2014, the development line of OpenFOAM , known as “OpenFOAM-dev” was released publicly on GitHub.

The OpenFOAM Foundation is the organisaton which holds the copyright of the OpenFOAM software and documentation, whose purpose is to manage and distribute OpenFOAM as free, open source software for the benefit of its users. It is a registered company, limited by guarantee based in England. As such, it has no share capital or shareholders, but has individual members committed to free, open source software, who run the organisation on a voluntary basis. It has no employees and any annual profit is retained within the organisation and cannot be distributed to members. OpenFOAM® is a registered trademark of OpenCFD Ltd, licensed to the OpenFOAM Foundation in 2011 so that it could distribute its software under that name.