IDL-dependence

IDL is a commercial computing/visualization package upon which early versions of VoxBo (and its predecessor, NewTenureMaker) were built. One of the major goals of the VoxBo project has been to build truly free software, which means removing our dependence on IDL. This doesn't mean we won't support users who like IDL, or MATLAB, or whatever other commercial packages people enjoy. It just means that we feel it shouldn't be required to do data analysis.

As of Release 1.8, VoxBo's IDL-dependence is down to a single component, the voxel surfer. A good deal of the functionality from the voxel surfer is already available in vbview, and the rest will be there shortly. So for the most part, you can use VoxBo even if you have no IDL licenses and can't afford them.