What's the business plan ?
Why don't make it like 20$ a month ?
Are your working in a company that needs this 16000$ software, so they are just happy to cut the fees and don't care about making it opensource ?
> And epanet-js is a tool that you can run in a browser - full simulations with a WASM-based engine. It’s competing with expensive old-school software that costs $16,000 a year, runs exclusively on Windows, is priced by “pipes”, and uses the same engine, EPANET. This is so much better in comparison. A radical improvement.
I have absolutely no use for epanet-js, but this is so cool. Exactly what free software is supposed to do.
I know someone who uses it to design clean drinking water distribution systems in rural communities in Central America. They would not be able to do what they do if they had to pay for an expensive commercial licence.
Desktop EPANET is still windows-only though, so having a browser version is pretty cool.
It grants them a two-year headspace in which licensees are prohibited to create a competing offering based on the open sourced code—so e.g. Amazon can't just take the source code and create a paid offering within AWS without contributing to upstream—at least for two years after officially licensing the software.
I was under the impression that municipalities use GIS systems to contain "everything" (sewers, water and gas pipes, and the electricity,telephone,fiber cables etc)
Is that just a pipe dream (no pun intended) or do those lack the simulation part ?
I'm no physicist, but I've worked as a software engineer on energy (and drinking water, which EPANET simulates) infrastructure network design tooling for the last six or so years. It has been my understanding that simulating and validating multimodal network designs, which take into account electricity, gas consumption, district heating, is extremely difficult.
Municipalities definitely have systems that document where everything already is under the ground (though especially in Europe there are many older cities where the data of old pipes is lacking), but for designing new energy networks, an "everything" simulation and solving model is very, very complex.
What's the business plan ? Why don't make it like 20$ a month ? Are your working in a company that needs this 16000$ software, so they are just happy to cut the fees and don't care about making it opensource ?
> And epanet-js is a tool that you can run in a browser - full simulations with a WASM-based engine. It’s competing with expensive old-school software that costs $16,000 a year, runs exclusively on Windows, is priced by “pipes”, and uses the same engine, EPANET. This is so much better in comparison. A radical improvement.
I have absolutely no use for epanet-js, but this is so cool. Exactly what free software is supposed to do.
I suppose it's correct to say EPANET competes with expensive commercial offerings, but it's actually available completely free:
https://www.epa.gov/water-research/epanet
I know someone who uses it to design clean drinking water distribution systems in rural communities in Central America. They would not be able to do what they do if they had to pay for an expensive commercial licence.
Desktop EPANET is still windows-only though, so having a browser version is pretty cool.
This is really cool and fair play to him/them for doing this..
One thing I don't understand though is the license.
> Fully open source (MIT) after two years under our Functional Source License (FSL).
What exactly does this mean?
It grants them a two-year headspace in which licensees are prohibited to create a competing offering based on the open sourced code—so e.g. Amazon can't just take the source code and create a paid offering within AWS without contributing to upstream—at least for two years after officially licensing the software.
You can read the FSL license text here: https://github.com/getsentry/fsl.software/blob/main/FSL-1.1-...
Sounds like a reasonable tradeoff to ensure companies don't have immediate disadvantages from open sourcing their code.
One of the two authors of epanet-js here - you can check out the source code for the app here:
https://github.com/epanet-js/epanet-js
I was under the impression that municipalities use GIS systems to contain "everything" (sewers, water and gas pipes, and the electricity,telephone,fiber cables etc) Is that just a pipe dream (no pun intended) or do those lack the simulation part ?
I'm no physicist, but I've worked as a software engineer on energy (and drinking water, which EPANET simulates) infrastructure network design tooling for the last six or so years. It has been my understanding that simulating and validating multimodal network designs, which take into account electricity, gas consumption, district heating, is extremely difficult.
Municipalities definitely have systems that document where everything already is under the ground (though especially in Europe there are many older cities where the data of old pipes is lacking), but for designing new energy networks, an "everything" simulation and solving model is very, very complex.
Some might in fact contain everything, but the core difference is that this is a simulation engine not a GIS tool.
My first thought - is it possible to use Epanet.JS to create a browser-based SimCity-like game?
Never heard of EPANET nor did I know that drinkable water systems had a specialized software. That's a great early hour knowledge.