Editing Open Inventor (section)

==Recent history==

After many years of being solely available under proprietary licensing from TGS (now [[FEI Company|FEI]]), Inventor was released under the [[LGPL]] [[open source license]] in August 2000 and is available from SGI. Around the same time, the [[Coin3D]] API clone library was released by SIM (Systems in Motion). SIM was later acquired by the Kongsberg group and renamed [[Kongsberg SIM]]. The Coin library had been written in a [[clean room design|clean-room]] fashion from scratch, sharing no code with the original SGI Inventor library but implementing the same API for compatibility reasons. Kongsberg ended development of Coin3D in 2011,<ref>{{cite web|url=https://github.com/coin3d/coin/wiki|title=Coin3D / Coin / wiki / Home — Github|website=[[GitHub]] |date=30 March 2020|publisher=}}</ref> and released the code under the BSD 3-clause license.

The open-source version from SGI is not maintained, and SGI has not indicated a commitment to further develop the library. The open-source release is used in MeVisLab (MeVis Medical Solutions AG and Fraunhofer MEVIS), however, and development of that continues.<ref>[http://www.mevislab.de MeVisLab]</ref> Thermo Scientific Open Inventor is still being developed, and has added a number of improvements to the original Inventor API for [[medical imaging]], [[medical image computing]], 3D [[reflection seismology]], and [[petroleum reservoir]] modeling.

The Open Inventor API is still commonly used for a wide range of scientific and engineering visualization systems around the world for the development of complex 3D application software.
TGS was acquired by [[Mercury Computer Systems]] in 2004. It became an independent company, [[Visualization Sciences Group]] (VSG), in June 2009. In 2012, VSG was acquired by FEI Company.  FEI Company was acquired in 2016 by the [[Thermo Fisher Scientific]] Materials & Structural Analysis Division, which continues to develop (and support) Open Inventor.