Issue
145 August 2002
The
Open-Source HCS Project
by
Neil Cherry
It’s been a while, so now it’s time to set the
record straight. Despite the rumors, the HCS II project
is not dead. In fact, HCS has been licensed and is
now an open-source project. In this article, Neil
brings us up to speed on the HCS II project’s past,
present, and exciting future.
Start
•
So What's An HCS • Goals
• Lessons Learned •
Still
Left To Do •
Sources
& PDF
The inmates
have taken over the asylum! The HCS users have gotten
together and asked Steve Ciarcia to let us turn the
HCS project into an open-source project. Steve graciously
licensed the HCS II project to us under the FSF’s GPL.
Circuit Cellar has no affiliation with the current project
other than its history and the fact that many of the
project’s participants are subscribers.
Up-to-date
details of the project can be found at our Source Forge
web site, and we’re keeping the discussions open and
in the Circuit Cellar HCS newsgroup. This makes perfect
sense because the HCS users have had a group there since
the HCS II inception in 1992. Now, many of the HCS users
may think the project has been put away and forgotten,
but we’re here to let you know that it’s up, running,
and has a bright future.
So, here’s
what happened. During the early months of 2001, a few
users asked about the status of the HCS II. On April
11, 2001, Charles Byrnes posted the fateful question,
"Is HCS dead?" A flurry of responses then
went back and forth, and on April 23, 2001, Steve posted,
"Is the HCS II Dead? Not if you help." Since
then, more than one-third of the messages posted were
on subjects related to the resurgence of HCS. I would
say that there is still significant interest in the
HCS II.
Over the
next few months, a large number of the online HCS community
chipped in to perform all sorts of duties to pull together
the Open-Source HCS project. We still have much to do
and plenty of work to spread around. Also, please remember
that this effort is totally voluntary. We are not getting
paid to design hardware or write software. We do it
out of curiosity and because of our interest in automation.
