Hi All,
I'll start with the good:
thanks to Anders Dale (UCSD), Howard Pinsky (CorTechs) and Christian Euseman (MGH), we have finally signed an open source agreement for FreeSurfer. We will be posting a "read-only" tarball on the website in the next couple of weeks, and anyone is free to download it and look at it. We will *not* be supporting a make/configure type env for people to download and build, as we simply aren't ready to do so. We plan to implement such a procedure, but it will be a while. Instead of waiting until that was ready, I thought people would like to have access to the source to at least see what things are doing, and be able to see file formats and such.
Now the bad news. I know we've been promising a new release, but it is being delayed for another month or two. Partially this is due to the opensourcing, which has taken our time and resources, but it is also because we *really* don't want to release something that is half broken. There are also a number of features that we want to get into the release, and not have updates to it right away. We have continued to post current versions on the website as prereleases, but *please* be aware that we can't guarantee that these versions will be compatible with the one we ultimately release. I think they will be, but can't say for sure. Our hope is that datasets processed with the prerelease versions can be rerun automatically with recon-all --rerun or something like that, but again, no guarantees.
cheers, Bruce