[Openpetraorg-weekly] Update December 2014: work of past months and friendly fork

[Timotheus P. <tim...@po...>]

Statement from OM:

The last months have been used to on the one hand round off
functionality that was nearly complete and on the other hand work on
features that had not been started. As mentioned in the last News
Update we work closely together with OM Switzerland on the future
development. As a direct outcome of the visit to OM Switzerland the
link between finance and partner information has been improved, which
results in an easier workflow from a data entry perspective.

Looking at the future development of OpenPetra it became clear that OM
has a number of unique requirements. Currently it’s impossible to come
up with a generic solution in each case. To meet OM’s needs we felt it
necessary to now start an OM specific private fork of the OpenPetra
project. This does not mean the Open Source idea is abandoned, nor
does it mean that the Open Source project will not be developed any
further. OM will continue to be a major contributor to the OpenPetra
Open Source project. Enhancements which are not OM-specific will be
taken over and made publicly available. For this reason we named it a
“friendly fork”.
When OM is forking off, Timotheus will take over the responsibility of
maintaining the Open Source project. We believe that this is the way
forward to serve both worlds best.

Notes from Timotheus:

In the past days, the code of OpenPetra has moved to Github: use the
shortcut http://code.openpetra.org. This is one of several steps how
we want to prepare the way for an active community of developers and
users around OpenPetra. You will see more details for the
infrastructure of the OpenPetra community appear first on the forum at
https://forum.openpetra.org and later on the OpenPetra website and
monthly updates mailinglist.

The copyright of OpenPetra will remain with OM. Therefore each
developer that contributes towards OpenPetra needs to agree to a
Contributor License Agreement
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contributor_License_Agreement) which we
still have to write down. This will make it easier to switch to
another license in the future.

The new place to report issues for OpenPetra will be at Github:
http://issues.openpetra.org

Today, we release a new version of OpenPetra, that contains all the
work from the OM team up to the friendly fork, and also includes the
extensions that Timotheus has worked on over the past 2 years. Please
read the release notes for further details:
https://www.openpetra.org/openpetra-2014-12-alpha

Timotheus will publish a roadmap towards a Beta for OpenPetra and a
stable version soon.

You are welcome to discuss this news update in our new Discourse Forum
at https://forum.openpetra.org/t/update-december-2014-work-of-past-months-and-friendly-fork/338!