Graphviz (was Re: [plug] CommIT Day 2, summary)

[Nick Bannon]

On Sun, Sep 19, 2004 at 05:28:41PM +0800, James Devenish wrote:
> In message <d12e5c90409190221306545bf at mail.gmail.com>
> on Sun, Sep 19, 2004 at 05:21:22PM +0800, Senectus . wrote:
[...]
> > Was quite impressed with the app that the "pixelglow" guy was showing
> > off on the Mac... ( http://www.pixelglow.com/graphviz/ ) (I'm sure the
> > guy told me it has been ported to Linux and win32...but I can't seem
> > to find that on the site),
> 
> The original product is GraphViz from AT&T labs
> <http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/graphviz/>. I've generally found
> it difficult and time-consuming to get nice results. Perhaps this is why
> the pixelglow guy is getting attention.

I noticed that... It was also trumpeted here:
http://www.opensource.wa.gov.au/News/news_item.2004-09-14.6289304241

I hate to detract from that, but AT&T's GraphViz and anything built on
it aren't "Open Source" and are in fact quite terrifying non-free.

I haven't quite figured out if you can build pixelglow's application
from what's available, but http://www.pixelglow.com/graphviz/download/
does not have source, and if you follow the link through to
http://www.graphviz.org/Download_source.html you find tarballs with the
AT&T version 1.2D source code agreement, which is only good for
frightening small children.
http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/graphviz/license/source.html

(The binary-only downloads from http://www.pixelglow.com/graphviz/download/
do include header files with that reference, too)

The alternatives to graphviz aren't as shiny and polished, but they
include SpringGraph (Perl), VCG and graphopt.
http://www.chaosreigns.com/code/springgraph/
http://rw4.cs.uni-sb.de/users/sander/html/gsvcg1.html
http://schmuhl.org/graphopt/

Nick.

-- 
   Nick Bannon   | "I made this letter longer than usual because
nick-sig at rcpt.to | I lack the time to make it shorter." - Pascal