GADS/OS becomes first GPL project at Outercurve

The Outercurve Foundation has announced that the GADS Open Source Project has been placed into the care of the Outercurve Foundation and will be managed in the DLSI (Data, Language and Systems Interoperability) gallery. The Outercurve Foundation, formerly the Codeplex Foundation, is a non-profit organisation designed to offer projects the support and assistance they need to place those projects under an independent foundation's care, rather than trying to create a "single-project" foundation.

GADS/OS is designed for electricity generators to collect performance and event data from around the power grid for NERC (North American Electric Reliability Corporation), and it was open sourced in April 2011 after having been developed and sold by HBS Solomon since 2004. With the legal requirement for electrical generators to report reliability in Canada, US and Mexico, software like GADS/OS has become a commodity to be developed by the community of 200 companies which use the software in over 3800 generating units. The GADS Open Source Project was formed to continue the development of the software, but the issue of where to legally hold the software was not clear.

This is where the Outercurve Foundation comes in, CTO Stephen Walli told The H: "We're a 'Foundation in a box' for organisations who want to place their open source projects". By contributing the project to the Foundation, the project and participants get the benefits of foundation status without the complexity of creating, funding and managing the legal entity. The Foundation also has experience in guiding open source software out of the legal morass that can be corporate policy, and making it simpler for corporations to contribute to projects.

The GADS/OS project will join the fifteen projects which reside in the three galleries of the Foundation; the ASP.NET Open Source Gallery, the Research Accelerators Gallery and the DLSI Gallery. Unlike the other projects, GADS/OS is licensed under the GPL version 2 which makes it the first GPL project in the galleries, helping reinforce the foundation's licence agnostic approach.

(djwm)