Development status Active | Written in C++ (wxWidgets) | |
 | ||
Developer(s) Open Babel development team Initial release 2 June 2005; 11 years ago (2005-06-02) Stable release 2.4.0 / 25 September 2016; 5 months ago (2016-09-25) Repository sourceforge.net/projects/openbabel | ||
Open Babel is computer software, a chemical expert system mainly used to interconvert chemical file formats. Due to the strong relationship to informatics this program belongs more to the category cheminformatics than to molecular modelling. It is available for Windows, Unix, Linux, macOS, and Android. It is free and open-source software released under a GNU General Public License (GPL) 2.0.
Contents
The project's stated goal is: "Open Babel is a community-driven scientific project assisting both users and developers as a cross-platform program and library designed to support molecular modeling, chemistry, and many related areas, including interconversion of file formats and data."
History
Open Babel and JOELib were derived from the OELib cheminformatics library. In turn, OELib was based on ideas in the original chemistry program Babel and an unreleased object-oriented programming library called OBabel.