lib3ds is an overall software library for managing 3D-Studio Release 3 and 4 ".3DS" files. It is a free alternative to Autodesk's 3DS File Toolkit for managing 3DS files. It started out in 1996 to be released in 1999 under the GNU General Public License (GPL) as Open-Source software. In 2000, the library was completely rewritten in ANSI-C to attain more hardware platform independence. To enable commercial application the license was changed to GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)