We are pleased to announce the first LGPL-licensed open source version of DFTB+ (release 17.1).

DFTB+ offers a fast approximate density functional theory based quantum simulation tool with a range
of functionalities for ground and excited state calculations.

Our aim is to extend the active user base beyond the community of the 2000+ users who had 
previously registered for access the the code under the older licence. We want to make DFTB+ useful
for an even broader scientific community in future years. We have therefore changed the license of
the software to the open source license LGPL, enabling you to:

* obtain and use DFTB+ without any registration process, independent of whether your research is
  commercial or not

* interface and distribute DFTB+ as part of your academic or commercial software package,

* easily contribute to DFTB+ by using our publicly hosted repository.

For more details see http://www.dftbplus.org