Partners
The following institutes, universities and companies have participated in the development of CGAL.
Funding by European Research Programs
A good share of the development has been funded by the following successive European Research Programs, which were also instrumental for the coordination of the project: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 - 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 Tool Repository. The Project IST NoE-506766 started in 2004 for a duration of 48 months.
GUDHI - The GUDHI Project contributed to the developement of higher-dimensional features in CGAL, such as dD Triangulations or dD Geometry Kernels. The FP7-IDEAS-ERC 339025 - GUDHI started in 2014 for a duration of 5 years.
Historical Context
The Pioneers
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, such 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, which was developed at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis.
License
The project originally had a license granting free use in academia. In January 2003 the GeometryFactory spin-off company was founded, offering commercial licenses for CGAL. In November 2003 the project adopted an Open Source license, and in October 2005 it published the CGAL Open Source Project Rules and Procedures in order to help users and developers understand the decision process behind CGAL and how one can get involved.
