Is the DIRSIG software open source? Is the source code available?

No. The software has been developed over the course of two decades under funding from a variety of commercial and government sponsors. Furthermore, RIT has invested a significant amount of it's own resources into the development of the software. As a result, the source code is the property of RIT and the model is distributed in binary form only.

Since RIT does hold the rights to the source code, we are commonly asked why we don't make it available to the users. Without any mechanism that forces users to propagate contributed changes back to RIT, the concern of both RIT and our primary government users is that the code will fracture into numerous customized versions. The government wants to know that if two users submit their results on a given task where DIRSIG was used, that the same model was used. When multiple versions evolve, verification and validation also must be questioned. Therefore, RIT does not plan to make the source code generally available.

However, we do publish very frequently in open literature (conference papers, journal papers, and student theses) exactly how various calculations are performed. In some cases, if a user really wants to see or understand a specific calculation, then we will reveal that portion of the code. Finally, we continue to open up run-time interfaces within the model so that DIRSIG can be better integrated into other modeling workflows.