Subject: Announcement: Open Babel 1.99 (beta) Release

From: Geoff Hutchison <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2002 08:05:29 -0600 (CST)

Open Babel 1.99
----------------

The Open Babel team is pleased to announce the release of Open Babel
1.99, a first beta release for the 2.0 version of the free,
open-source replacement for the Babel chemistry file translation
program.

Open Babel is a project designed to pick up where Babel left off, as a
cross-platform program and library designed to interconvert between
many file formats used in molecular modeling and computational chemistry.

At the moment, the beta release is not yet a drop-in replacement
for babel as some file formats are not implemented and bond orders are
not calculated for QM file formats.

Open Babel includes two components, a command-line utility and a
C++ library. The command-line utility is intended to be used as a
replacement for the original babel program, to translate between
various chemical file formats. The C++ library includes all of the
file-translation code as well as a wide variety of utilities to
foster development of other open source chemistry software.

For more information, check the Open Babel website and FAQ:
Website: <http://openbabel.sourceforge.net/>
FAQ:     <http://openbabel.sourceforge.net/FAQ.html>
Release: <http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=40728>

---

From: "David Konerding, Ph.D." <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2002 13:37:14 -0800

>Open Babel 1.99

Are you aware that OElib (www.eyesopen.com) is the "future" of babel?

Dave

---

From: Geoff Hutchison <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 31 Jan 2002 17:08:49 -0600 (CST)

> Are you aware that OElib (www.eyesopen.com) is the "future" of babel?

OELib was originally released as a GPL'ed library. It has been rewritten
and is now closed-source. Matt Stahl says that they may at some future
point release binaries to replace babel, but the source will still be
closed.

As I was one of the contributors to the GPL'ed version of OELib, I took
the last open version of the OELib code and spun it into Open Babel with
the best wishes of Matt and Open Eyes, Inc. They'd like to see the free
version prosper.

In short, Open Babel *is* OELib. I even wrote a migration guide for code
written to OELib and interested in migrating to Open Babel. (The changes
are naturally small at the moment.)

--
-Geoff Hutchison                <[email-masked]>
Marks/Ratner Groups             (847) 491-3295
Northwestern Chemistry          <http://www.chem.nwu.edu>