In early 2001 Jeffrey Travis wrote an article for LTR titled "An Open Invitation: Open Source Software in LabVIEW" In this article Jeffrey described the history and the meaning of Open Source. He also announced that he had released three projects under the Lesser Gnu Public License (LGPL) as part of the LabVIEW Open Source Tools (L.O.S.T.) initiative. At NI Week 2001, Jeffrey Travis, called a meeting to discuss the L.O.S.T. initiative and Open Source LabVIEW, in general. This was a wonderful meeting with solid representation from the LabVIEW community as a whole. One of the main topics at the NI Week 2001 meeting was licensing. This was and still is a hot topic, as a recent Info-LV thread would indicate. Also, at the meeting a mailing list and yahoo group called "OpenG" was created. In the subsequent months the "openg" yahoo group debated and discussed the intricacies of the GPL and LGPL in an attempt to decide how these Licenses could/should be applied to LabVIEW code, since LabVIEW is special in many ways. In an effort to overcome the Licensing dilemma, I worked with several other members of the LOST/OpenG group to draft a white paper titled "Applying The LGPL to LabVIEW". This document describes our interpretation of how the LGPL may be used to protect LabVIEW code, how LGPL protected LabVIEW code may be used in other LabVIEW applications, and why (in our opinion) the LGPL is the best licensing choice for Open Source LabVIEW software. This was not designed to end the debate, but rather to put the LGPL, in the context of LabVIEW, in plain English.

On March 22, 2001 the OpenG.org website went live. After finding the resources on Yahoo groups limiting and to give the LOST/OpenG group a more permanent place to call home, with Jeffrey Travis's blessing, the OpenG.org site was created. This site was to serve the purpose of giving the Open Source LabVIEW community a home. I envisioned OpenG.org as a place for providing information and resources to LabVIEW developers, which would allow them to see how they could be a part of the well-established Open Source community. At OpenG.org, project registration services were provided, and a community forum application was set up to allow discussion and file sharing to occur. In less than 5 months, almost 300 users have joined the group.

As we all knew it would, LabVIEW is rapidly moving into the realm of "real" software languages. Several projects have been established at SourceForge.net. These LabVIEW projects share the same developer space as MySQL, Python, Tcl, and many others. SourceForge CVS repositories have been set up for some OpenG.org projects, allowing developers across the world to collaborate on projects. Developers are checking LabVIEW code in and out of SCC over the Internet. The procedures for setting up and using CVS at SourceForge are going to be documented at OpenG.org, allowing other LabVIEW developers to take advantage of this free service.

On April 29th, 2002, the OpenG Toolkit was released, which was a collection of OpenG project VIs and other freeware. This project was aimed at getting a common set of Open Source tools into the palettes of LabVIEW developers. Another useful thing that came out of this project was documentation on how to integrate developer tools into LabVIEW. This document lives on OpenG.org and as an LTR article titled "Customizing the LabVIEW Development Environment".

On June 6th, 2002 the OpenG Application Builder was released, which allowed developers using the OpenG Toolkit to build applications with OpenG VIs stored in a separate LLB, keeping Front Panels and Diagrams. This provided an automated mechanism for LGPL compliance when distributing built applications that used LGPL protected LabVIEW code. In addition to this feature, the OpenG Application builder provided a programmatic interface to the LabVIEW application builder and a suite of other useful features. The OpenG Toolkit grow and, in an attempt to manage the many individual packages that comprise the toolkit, a project called the OpenG Package Manager was started. The OpenG Package Manager automated the packaging, installation, uninstallation, and upgrade of Open Source LabVIEW tools, and the next version of the Open Source Toolkit will be OGPM compatible.

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