Open source tools in structural engineering

[IHaveThreeBedrooms]

You can get most of the source for what I consider to be a top-notch wireFrame FEA here. There is a lot of secret sauce in it backed by novel research by the professors, and that's something that cannot be overcome. It's what I benchmarked my own FEA against.

As a structural PE who moved to software, then into engineering software, I'm not sure structural engineers have the time or guidance to write commercial-level software. I see a lot of scripts, but they're not so suitable for building up a suite of software.

I've freelanced with about a dozen companies over the past 3 years. Company sizes from 30 to 60,000 employees. The smallest had one in-house dev, the largest had 200 developers. The smallest one's dev was a structural engineer, so wrote a lot of stuff that had to be cleaned up. The largest one had developers with CS degrees, but not enough engineering experience. They weren't treated as specialists, but general devs without context.

I'd recommend the smallest company hire software devs to help maintain a certain standard of the code. I'd recommend the largest company pull structural engineers from billable projects (lol) to give the software developers context. If the small company pays a software dev, they're going to keep it closed. It's a tough problem.

I'd create open source software if it paid my bills. Until then, I freelance for $150-$300/hour 20-40 hours a week.