18.1 Leading a university open source project  (Page 3/10)

Rensselaer’s initial efforts focused on restructuring some of the code to more cleanly separate the server (back-end) part from the web client (front end). This allowed us, among other things, to easily provide a “skins” capability. The UW calendar became more modular and amenable to using other client interfaces that other developers might care to build. Two of our goals going into the project were to leverage our expertise in Java, J2EE, web client interfaces, and to avoid becoming calendar experts, leaving that role to the University of Washington developers.

In December 2003, UWCalendar was made available at RPI. Over the next 18 months, we played an increasingly large role in UWCalendar development. The University of Washington really developed two versions of UWCalendar, the open source version which we collaborated on, and a local version, based on the open source version, which integrated with their locally developed portal, providing significant value to the UW community. Their obligations to the local UW version made it increasingly difficult for them to contribute to the open source version.

In 2005 we became convinced that UWCalendar would not achieve its ambitious goals and began development of a rearchitected, hibernate-based successor. After much soul searching, in September 2005, we told our colleagues that we would be working on a new version, and we announced a preview release of Bedework in December 2005, making us leaders of a new open source project. The first production version of Bedework, version 3.0, was released in March 2006.

Bedework’s design goals and capabilities include platform independence (via Java/J2EE), database independence (via hibernate), internationalization, standards (RFC 2445, CalDAV) compliance, portlet (JSR168) support, no license fees or restrictions (BSD style open source license) fine-grained distributed administration, support for public events, personal calendars, and departmental calendars, easy to install code with complete, well-defined APIs, no local dependencies, support for external authentication (such as LDAP, Yale CAS, etc) via container authentication, full access control via the CalDAV model, XML and XSLT based web clients allowing for a number of capabilities, such as localization and multilanguage support and RSS syndication.

Bedework is probably in production use or in some stage of production deployment at about two dozen institutions of higher education.

Ip – ours and others

As an independent open source project, we needed to decide early on how to handle the intellectual property issues associated with Bedework. The two pressing questions to be decided were the terms and conditions of the Bedework license, and the terms and conditions of the Bedework contributor’s agreements.

Although the case could be made that Bedework was only the logical heir to UWCalendar and not a derivative product, we weren’t sure what it meant to make such as a case, or how much work it would prove to be to make such a case. Consequently, we decided to pretty much adopt and adapt the terms of UWCalendar, allowing the Bedework source code to be used for any purposes, including commercially, as long as acknowledge is given. Having to choose from the large number of open source licensing terms was not an appealing prospect anyhow.