Gerris was released as free and open-source software, subject to the requirements of the GNU General Public License (GPL), version 2 or any later.

[8] Lastly, one can note that the (non-hydrostatic) Navier–Stokes solver was also used in the ocean to study: On the contrary Gerris does not allow the modeling of compressible fluids (supersonic flows).

Several methods can be used to provide a numerical solution to partial differential equations: Gerris belongs to the finite volumes family of CFD models.

[13] The latter brings in facilities to perform geometric computations such as triangulation of solid surfaces and their intersection with fluid cells.

[15][16] Following a redesign of the software organization, Gerris became Basilisk,[17] which allows one to develop its own solver (not necessarily in fluid mechanics) using various data structures (including of course the quadtree/octree) and optimized operators for iteration, derivation, etc.