ACE favours open-source engineering tools whenever they provide the best balance of transparency, flexibility and long-term value. Open workflows make it easier to customise methods, understand numerical behaviour and build solutions that remain usable beyond a single proprietary software stack.
Transparent code and documented workflows improve reviewability, reproducibility and confidence in numerical results. They also make it easier to adapt a solver or a pipeline to the actual engineering problem instead of forcing the project to fit the limits of a closed environment.
When open tools are used, clients benefit from greater visibility on the method and from solutions that can evolve with their needs.
ACE works extensively with open ecosystems such as OpenFOAM and related scientific tools. Web technologies such as vtk.js also show how open-source development can create powerful, modern technical visualisation solutions.
The goal is not ideology for its own sake, but better engineering: tools that can be inspected, extended and integrated into project-specific workflows.