VTKEdge was created in July 2008 in order to make the results of our Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Businesses Technology Transfer (STTR) endeavors available to the open source community, while satisfying the commercialization requirements of these programs. Our idea was one successfully used by many other businesses: offer the software under both GPLv3 terms and through a commercial license.

Over the few years, we have found that this approach did not satisfy either of our primary goals. The reviewers of our SBIR / STTR proposals are still perplexed by our business model, and the open source community is distrustful of anything with a reciprocal license. Therefore as of April 2010, we have converted the VTKEdge toolkit over to a BSD license. We are actively working to move VTKEdge functionality into the relevant underlying toolkit (VTK, ITK, or ParaView). This is a slow process since these other toolkit require more tests, code coverage, and platform-independence than many of the current VTKEdge algorithms provide. If there is particular functionality that you would like to see transition faster, please contact us at kitware@kitware.com to discuss options which may include directly funding the work, providing test cases or data to validate the functionality, or submitting dashboards for testing purposes.