In other cases commercial license may be purchased, under different options for academic/research and industrial customers.

[4] The CGAL project was founded in 1996, as a consortium of eight research institutions in Europe and Israel: Utrecht University, ETH Zurich, Free University of Berlin, INRIA Sophia Antipolis, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, Max Planck Institute for Informatics Saarbrücken, Johannes Kepler University Linz, and Tel-Aviv University.

As of 2013[update] it is managed by a thirteen-member editorial board, with an additional 30 developers and reviewers.

[6] The project started in 1996 as the pooling of the previous efforts of several project participants:PlaGeo and SpaGeo from Utrecht University, LEDA of the Max-Planck-Institute for Informatics and C++GAL of INRIA Sophia Antipolis.

The LEDA library encompasses a broader range of algorithms.