* Originally posted at www.elebbs.com *

This message was sent to the beta testers team earlier today, 

EleBBS was started in September, 1996 as a sparetime project of me. It was,
and still is, my largest programming project I ever worked on. In those
years, EleBBS has grown into a huge project, on which I am truely proud. I
learned a lot while developping EleBBS, and I think EleBBS has matured a
lot - it has a tremendous amount of features, and it offers a flexibility
and ease of use that I think are unmatched in this type of software.

However, as many of you have noticed the true dedication to EleBBS has been
gone. Where there were almost releases each 4 months in the past, there
hasn't been a full release since September 2001. That's almost 1,5 years
without a full release, and iin those 1,5 years not much has changed to the
codebase.
Also, the last few years, my programming time has been severely reduced due
to a number of different reasons - having a fulltime job being the most
important one. Managing 3 large projects (EleBBS, EleWEB and EleXer), has
turned out to be impossible  - my main intrest has shifted to EleXer and
EleWEB, and this leaves little to no time for EleBBS itself.

The last few months I considered several options, releasing EleBBS as an
opensource project was one of them and this option has been pursued. The
past few weeks i've been preparing the EleBBS code tree for release, and
after moving elebbs.com to a deedicated server, i've setup an CVS
repository at elebbs.com.

The EleBBS, EleXer and EleWEB code will be placed into this repository, and
released under the Q Public License - you can find more information about
this license at http://www.trolltech.com/licenses/qpl-annotated.html.

The release of this code is intended to give other developers a chance to
contribute to the development of these projects - I will keep full control
of these projects, and I will keep developing them - it just means that it
will give a chance for othher people to give the development a push by
contributing code or fixing bugs.

I would like to thank you all for your support of EleBBS and for all the
input you all have given to the development of EleBBS - I hope you will
keep on doing this, even though the development process changes slightly.

You can browse the CVS repository by visiting this link, or by connecting
using a regular CVS client to elebbs.com using the user anonymous. The
CVSROOT is set to /home/cvsroot.

Please note again - this does not mean that I will abandon EleBBS or any of
the other projects.

Sincerely,
Maarten Bekers. 

 

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