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jonathan writes:

The Evermotion team just release the Nox rendering software under the Apache license.

NOX physically based renderer, fully integrated with Blender and 3ds Max (and with C4D support) is now Open Source. We release it on Apache license - free to commercial use and modifications.

You can freely improve and modify this render engine, integrate it with any 3d software, write plugins for NOX, use it in your commercial works and / or sell it. The possibilities are endless and depend only on you.

Main features of NOX:

• physical based engine
• enhanced post-processing
• rendering to layers
• real and fake DoF (Depth of Field)
• instancing and displacement
• subsurface scattering

tonyPick adds:

From the overview page:

NOX is a free stand-alone, physically-accurate state-of-an-art renderer. Its engine is based on unbiased methods. Global illumination is evaluated using Path Tracing or Bidirectional Path Tracing. Light behavior is based on laws of physics, however some simplifications occur. Many post-production actions can be done in NOX internally, so no additional software is necessary. NOX works with scenes created and imported from 3ds Max, Blender and Cinema4D.

The release is available at http://www.evermotion.org/nox/downloads

It looks to be a straight dump of the code (a 424MB bundle!) and appears to be a working directory snapshot complete with binary artifacts. It appears to be for MSVC (no obvious Git, SVN or similar), C++, windows code, Apache licensed.

There's some discussion started over at blenderartists on how the Blender 3D software application, and the associated path tracing engine (called Cycles) may benefit from this release.