It is free and open-source software released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), version 2.1 only, which permits open source and proprietary uses.

CAS.CADE (abbreviated from Computer Aided Software for Computer Aided Design and Engineering) was originally developed in the early 1990s by Matra Datavision, developer of Euclid CAD software as the underlying infrastructure for its future version Euclid Quantum.

[12] Open Cascade SAS was sold in 2003 to Principia, a French service provider corporation, and then in 2006 it was acquired by Euriware Group, a subsidiary of Areva.

[14] In March 2011, Thomas Paviot initiated a fork of the then most recent publicly available version 6.5.0 of Open Cascade library.

[15] In December 2011, Open Cascade installed a web portal for external contributors[16] and made its Mantis Bug Tracker[17] and further Git repository[18] publicly available (read-only GitHub mirror[19] has been established in '2020).

According to the statements on the new website, external contributors from the Open Source Community are encouraged to participate in the development of Open Cascade Technology, i.e. register bugs directly in the bugtracker, make contributions to the code after signing a Contributor License Agreement,[20] etc.