Why open source?
The
Open Source Initiative explains it well. When people can read, redistribute, and modify the source code, software evolves. People improve it, people adapt it, people fix bugs. The results of open-source development have been remarkable. Community-based efforts to develop software under open-source licenses have produced high-quality, high-performance code on which much of the Internet is run.
Why for OR?
Without open source implementations of existing algorithms, testing new ideas built on existing ones typically requires the time-consuming and error-prone process of re-implementing (and re-debugging and re-testing) the original algorithm. If the original algorithm were publicly available in a community repository, imagine the productivity gains from software reuse! Science evolves when previous results can be easily replicated.
Our Initiative
The COIN-OR project is managed by the COIN-OR Foundation, Inc., a non-profit educational foundation. We are building an open-source community for operations research software in order to speed development and deployment of models, algorithms, and cutting-edge computational research, as well as provide a forum for peer review of software similar to that provided by archival journals for theoretical research.
Getting Started
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