Monday, January 29, 2007

Open Quark Available

Open Quark is now properly downloadable from the Business Objects Labs web site, the earlier problems with the server having now been fixed.

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Open Quark posted, but server problem remains

The updated Quark page containing the first open source distributions of the Quark Framework were pushed to the public web site today, but unfortunately there is a problem with the resources server not picking up the new files (Zips, docs etc) that are a part of this update. Hopefully, this unfortunate situation will be resolved very shortly.

Open Quark 1.3.0 ready

The first Open Quark build (1.3.0) is complete and ready to go. Unfortunately, we're waiting for a problem with our corporate web tools to be fixed before we can publish. Hopefully this is hours rather than days.

Thursday, January 18, 2007

Open Quark is now... Open!

It's with a great deal of pleasure that I can announce that we've completed all the steps internally on the road to offering the Business Objects Quark Framework as a true open source project, and will now imminently publish a new version of the project with sources - as the real Open Quark Framework!

We have chosen to go with a BSD style license initially. This will allow us to publish most of the sources associated with the project, with what is hopefully the most attractive terms for its use and inclusion in other works. Business Objects itself will be reconsuming this project for its own uses. There is a relatively small amount of code, notably the Eclipse plugin, that we are unable to offer sources for at this time, but we are continuing to work to resolve this limitation.

Looking forward, we will be engaging in conversations regarding the hosting of this project by one of the established FOSS foundations, at which point a future version may change to use another OSS license. In the meantime, we will continue to host downloads of the Open Quark Framework on the Business Objects Labs pages. We are also working on a Contributor Agreement that will allow contributions of fixes and features to the project while we continue to host it.

The Open Quark Framework team here at Business Objects is naturally excited about the value they have created in the framework and tools. We are particularly now very enthusiastic about the potential for working with a community of those wishing to deploy solutions that include the framework, and with those wishing to help move it forward.

The first version of the framework for download, with sources, will be pushed to the Labs page in the next few days.

Thursday, January 11, 2007

Progress on Open Sourcing the Quark Framework

We are making progress on our legal and technical preparations to release the sources of the Quark Framework.

The hope is that we will have the process completed in the next few weeks, which will enable us to update the downloadable Open Quark archive to include source (or at least have a version that does). Once this is established, the most critical and 'legally significant' step in the process will be complete. The next step will be to complete a Contributor Agreement that will allow people to donate changes to the code for us to integrate, and of course the necessary processes for communication and coordination to allow this to occur practically.

Looking forward, we would like to find a FOSS foundation that would be interested in hosting the Quark Framework. Subsequent to the initial open source release, we will be working to establish contacts with such organisations and opening conversations in that direction.

Meanwhile, development on the framework and tools continues apace. The next release will include hierarchical module names, improvements to APIs, enhanced foreign declarations with new casting function generators. We are continuing to develop the Eclipse integration too, with improvements to the editor as well as the addition of a number of search/navigation features that are already available in ICE.

Hopefully 2007 will be an exciting year for the Quark Framework, with major activities to make it a practical choice for people wishing to leverage the advantages of the lazy functional paradigm in Java.