How does this relate to the original Babel and OELib, the “next” Babel?
The original Babel was written by Pat Walters and Matt Stahl, based on the “convert” program by Ajay Shah, and is still a remarkable application. Both Pat and Matt have moved on to other work. The original Babel is hosted by Smog.com on a Babel homepage, by the Computational Chemistry List (CCL) and of course by Open Babel at SourceForge.net. Along the way, the two original authors started a rewrite of Babel into C++ they called OBabel, which was never really publicly released. But Matt used some of these ideas in OELib, which was generously released under the GNU GPL by his employer, OpenEye Software, and the last known version of this OELib is still available from our file repository. OpenEye decided that for their purposes OELib needed a rewrite (now called OEChem), but this would be closed-source to include some advanced algorithms. So the GPL’ed version of OELib would not be maintained. Instead, the free version of OELib was renamed and has become “Open Babel” with the blessing of
