Research, Development and Promotion

Dasher Research is taking place in the inference group.

Dasher Development and Promotion is now managed as an Open Source project by our project manager, Matthew Garrett. [Why Open Source? Read The Cathedral and the Bazaar, which also offers advice on the number of core developers (1-3) - also available locally.]

You can interact with the Dasher team in two ways:

(1) If you have questions about Dasher, please follow the Any questions? link and use this FAQ to report any bugs or problems you encounter. When reporting bugs, please be sure to give the precise version of Dasher you are using, and complete information about how to reproduce the bug. [We maintain our own bug information locally on bugzilla. (view all)]

(2) If you would like to be kept up to date with Dasher development news, join the Dasher Yahoo Group. If you decide you'd like to hear special announcements only, you can join the same group, and then modify your membership settings at the discussion group website.

License
We plan to distribute Dasher source code under the GNU public license (GPL) initially. [A later version of Dasher may be distributed under the LGPL if there is demand.] These licenses allow anyone to use the source code, and ensure that modified versions of the source code remain equally free to everyone. Developers who contribute minor source code changes are asked to transfer copyright to the copyright owner (David Ward) in accordance with the advice of the free software foundation.

Timetable
We aim to release the source code about August 2002. At that time, we will still be making major modifications to the backbone of the source code, so we will not encourage major new contributions to the project; the source tree will be maintained in Cambridge and contributions can be submitted to us for inclusion.
By October 2002, we hope to have the overall structure fixed. At this point, we may move the source tree to sourceforge. We may also release a Dasher library under the LGPL.

If none of the above routes satisfies your needs, please send an email.