Pieter van Zyl - 2014-07-27

Good day.

As some of you know I worked on these projects:

Coefficient (https://sourceforge.net/projects/coefficient/) and Dithaka (https://sourceforge.net/projects/dithaka/) projects in 2005/2006 :)

I was working at the CSIR (Division: Meraka) which created Coefficient and its associated project Dithaka:

I was not the original architect of these projects.

We tried to revive these projects since 2006-2010 when I was working at the CSIR and taking more ownership. The revival never took off.

This project was used mostly at the University Of Pretoria. Morkel Theunissen (my friend and lecturer at UP) mostly promoted this project and asked that all third years students use Coefficient to manage their projects. I think they used Coefficient till about 2010. They also wrote some integration plugins with SVN.

I and some friends would like to take these projects over and implement some of my research ideas.

Some of technology plans will be:

    Use JPA+JSF
    Decide on EJB3 or Spring to provide services.
    Rewite all UI's
    Use Richfaces or Primefaces and their mobile frameworks
    Make the site mobile friendly
    Investigate the use of No-Sql (MongoDB, Oracle Berkley DB,etc) or object databases or use my own no-sql object database

Other ideas:

Project management tools
Review tools
Data science
Deploy to Cloud
Log analysis
Forum chat analysis

We could fork these projects but I feel I do have a history with them and they are not currently maintained.
Plus forking of a project is not a great thing to do. Splits the effort and confuses users.

The Cathedral and the Bazaar states that:
"5. When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a
competent successor."

Ending an Open-Source Project:
"It is natural for the founder of an open-source project to leave in order to move on to other interests. However, this does not necessarily mean just abandoning the project."
http://dreamsongs.com/ihe/IHE-56.html

I also know that Meraka always wanted people to take their ideas further and make a success in the outside world.

Can I please take over these projects? Credit will be given to the original teams.

Can we agree that I can take over these projects if I hear no objections in the next month?

Also note that both projects are using LGPL licenses.

The Coeficient license states:

/
* Coefficient - facilitates project based collaboration
* Copyright (C) 2003, Dylan Etkin, CSIR icomtek
* PO Box 395
* Pretoria 0001, RSA
* This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
* modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public
* License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
* version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
* This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
* but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
* MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU
* Lesser General Public License for more details.

* You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public
* License along with this library; if not, write to the Free Software
* Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA
*/

I have also tried to follow some of these suggestions:

http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/125789/how-to-go-about-taking-over-an-open-source-project

If there are any other suggestions or concerns please mail me.
Please also forward this mail to anyone that you feel might have an interest in this project.

Kindly