This led them to found a new project to address the issues they had observed in Ghemical and other packages. Two of the authors (Hutchison and Curtis) contributed to Ghemical previously, but had found that it was not easily extensible. was one of the only projects satisfying these needs at the time. The selection of free, open-source, cross-platform, three-dimensional, molecular builders was quite limited when the Avogadro project was founded in late 2006. Furthermore, in most cases, these programs use custom, proprietary file formats, and semantic and chemical data can be lost in conversion to other data formats. If the company were to change its direction or focus, this can lead to a loss of a significant research investment in a commercial product. They are, however, not available for all operating systems (most of them only run on Microsoft Windows), and are not easily extensible, customized, or integrated into automated workflows. , which are polished and capable of constructing many different types of molecular structures. There are existing commercial packages, such as CAChe/Scigress
The choice of software capable of building chemical structures in three dimensions is far smaller.
The aforementioned viewers are all freely available, and most of them are available under open-source licenses and work on the most common operating systems (Linux, Apple Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, and BSD). The field of molecular graphics is dominated by viewers with little or no editing capabilities, such as RasMol Many fields such as chemistry, materials science, physics, and biology, need efficient computer programs to both build and visualize molecular structures.