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.