ANN: Barracuda Newsflash

Hey folks!

I am writing is to inform you of some exciting developments. As most of you
are well aware, Barracuda was originally created under the Enhydra Public
License (EPL) - Lutris' proprietary derivative of the Mozilla Public License
(MPL). Over the past 3 years, one of the biggest request from developers has
been a more standard open source license. Unfortunately, this was impossible
to do without agreement from all copyright holders, like you, me
and...Lutris. In the past Lutris has been unwilling to modify the Barracuda
license, but as of today, we have completed an agreement to purchase the
Barracuda copyrights, and now it is our intention to:

a) relicense the code under a more standard open source license (eg. LGPL)
b) donate all the source copyrights to the Barracuda community (ensuring
Barracuda will live forever in the public domain)
c) open a new Barracuda portal at http://objectweb.org (increasing exposure,
mindshare, etc)

If you have been following the developments with XMLC/Enhydra, you already
know that those projects have already gone through a similar transformation,
largely due to the efforts of Alfred Madl and his team in Austria. I would
like to point out that Alfred played a key financial role in making this
possible for Barracuda as well - I am sure all of you appreciate this as
much as I do! Its community support like this that continues to drive the
Barracuda project forward.

SO! Where do we go from here? Now that we have obtained the rights to
Barracuda, there are a number of decisions we have to make - some of them
high level (like what new license we want to use), some of them low level
(like how we want to restructure the project, adjust the versioning, etc). I
think what I will do is start a separate email thread for each of these,
making it a little easier for people to follow the responses and particpate
in the discussions.

Just one final comment - from the get-go, Barracuda has always tried to be a
true community effort, and now more than ever its important for you to make
your voice heard so that the decisions we make take into account everyone's
interests. To this end, I'd just like to encourage everyone to take some
time over the next few days to participate in the discussions - not only to
make your opinions/preferences known, but also to consider where you might
be able to pitch in and get involved. There's going to be plenty of things
that need to get done, but if everyone gets involved it should be a breeze.

As always, comments and feedback are always welcomed. I look forward to
hearing from you!

Happy New Year!
Christian
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Christian Cryder
Internet Architect, ATMReports.com
Project Chair, BarracudaMVC - http://barracudamvc.org
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"Coffee? I could quit anytime, just not today"