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.