CERTI, an Open Source RTI, why and how

CERTI is an HLA RTI developed since 1996 by ONERA, the French Aerospace Lab. The initial purpose of CERTI was to develop a home made RTI in order to: learn HLA usage and HLA RTI internals (e.g. time management), have total control over source code in order to use this particular RTI with specific modifications in several research projects (security mechanism, multi-resolution, high performance distributed simulation...). CERTI became open source in 2002: https://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/certi. Since then, Open Source CERTI project has had variable activity periods, mostly driven by research project needs and funds. CERTI development has started again since the end of 2006, with an increased interest from the open source user community. After a brief status survey of CERTI, this presentation will focus on the Open Source objectives of CERTI and explain why this is not a product but a project driven OSS initiative, pushed by a Public establishment like ONERA. We will further explain how open sourceness CERTI stimulates its development and the community itself and why every stakeholder benefits from this.