Optiland

Optiland is an open-source optical design platform built in Python.

The project provides tools for building, tracing, analyzing, and optimizing optical systems, with support for both classical optical design workflows and modern computational optics. It includes ray tracing, paraxial analysis, spot diagrams, wavefront and diffraction-based analysis, PSF/MTF tools, tolerancing, optimization, and differentiable optics workflows through its PyTorch backend.

Our goal is to make high-quality optical design and simulation tools more accessible to researchers, students, engineers, educators, and open-source contributors.

Why we are raising funds

Optiland is developed and maintained by a small group of contributors. Funding helps us make the project more sustainable and allows us to invest time and resources into work that benefits the public open-source project.

Funds may be used for:
- maintenance, bug fixes, and releases
- documentation, tutorials, examples, and educational material
- website infrastructure and community resources
- continuous integration, hosting, domains, and other project infrastructure
- approved contributor or maintainer work that directly benefits Optiland
- outreach, community development, and project coordination

Transparency and governance

This Collective exists to support Optiland as an open-source project. Funds are managed transparently through Open Collective / Open Source Europe and are intended only for project-related activities.

The detailed governance process for allocating funds is still being defined together with the maintainer team. At this early stage, we will keep the process simple and conservative: expenses should be clearly related to Optiland, documented, and approved by project administrators according to the fiscal host’s rules.

Project links

- Website: https://optiland.org
- Source code: https://github.com/optiland/optiland
- Python package: https://pypi.org/project/optiland/