A portion of IMOD has been released as open source under the General Public License (GPL). This consists of all of the code that calls Qt, the C libraries, and some other components. With these Qt components as open source, anyone can contribute to the development of the 3dmod program without having to obtain a Qt license. However, such developments would also have to be open source. Open source packages are available here.
The full IMOD source code is available for approved non-profit organizations only. Organizations approved for the source code will only be able to use the code for their own purposes and won't be able to redistribute the code.
It is possible to write plugin modules for the 3dmod program. This can be done inside either of these two kinds of source packages. An old version of the Bead Fixer plugin serves as an example and template for writing a plugin. In addition, one can use these source packages to write programs using various IMOD libraries, although the full source package would be easier to work with for this purpose. To assist in this development, there is complete documentation of the C-code libraries in IMOD as well as of the plugin interface in 3dmod.
The plugin interface was refined and enhanced around January 2008, with some of these changes present only in IMOD 3.12. It may continue to evolve as more use is made of it. You would need to work from the latest source code to have all features available; however, that would generally require users of a plugin to have a beta version of IMOD installed.
Supported systems are RedHat or Fedora Linux, Macintosh OSX 10.3 or higher, and Windows under Cygwin with Intel compilers. The code may still compile on SGI IRIX 6.5. Compilations have been done on other flavors of Linux. Other Unix systems will require configuration files to be developed.
You will need a FORTRAN compiler, a C/C++ compiler and csh. A csh script is used to generate a configuration file. The make command uses sh.
Your system will also need to have Qt and OpenGL libraries and
include files. See the Makefile for more details on requirements.
OpenGL(R) is a registered trademark of Silicon Graphics, Inc.
