Welcome New OpenPKG Year 2008!

Welcome New OpenPKG Year 2008!

The same procedure as last year?
The same procedure as _every_ year!

Following our good tradition, the turn of the year is the prominent
point in time where we adjust the official OpenPKG world order to the
current organizational and technological circumstances. Please let us
take the opportunity to inform you about the current adjustments:

1. OpenPKG is finally logically, technically and organizationally split
   into the OpenPKG Framework and the pool of OpenPKG Packages and now
   logically focuses on so-called OpenPKG Stacks -- distributions which
   are based on the OpenPKG Framework and a set of OpenPKG Packages.
   The old OpenPKG-CURRENT distribution is know considered just be the
   generic and most prominent distribution for building OpenPKG Stacks.

2. The OpenPKG Project remains the well-established central
   coordination and resource sharing point and will continue to
   provide the central OpenPKG download resources, including the
   OpenPKG Framework, the OpenPKG Packages and the OpenPKG Stacks.
   Additionally, the OpenPKG Project will soon migrate to a new
   simplified infrastructure in order to be less confusing and
   complicated for new users. Some URLs will change. Separate
   announcements will follow.

3. The exclusive rights to use all OpenPKG Packages was assigned by
   contract from Ralf S. Engelschall to the OpenPKG Foundation e.V. The
   OpenPKG Foundation e.V. from now on is the official provider of the
   OpenPKG Packages, which technically includes all previously existing
   OpenPKG packages, except those which are now part of the OpenPKG
   Framework. The OpenPKG Foundation e.V. will continue to deliver the
   OpenPKG Packages under the previous OpenPKG license which grants
   mostly unlimited permission to use, copy, modify and distribute it.

4. The exclusive rights to use the whole OpenPKG Framework was
   assigned by contract from Ralf S. Engelschall to the OpenPKG GmbH.
   The OpenPKG GmbH from now on is the official provider of the OpenPKG
   Framework, which technically includes the OpenPKG "bootstrap", the
   OpenPKG tool chain, the OpenPKG registry, etc. The OpenPKG GmbH will
   deliver the OpenPKG Framework under licenses which grant limited
   permission to use, copy, modify and distribute it.

5. Based on the result of the comprehensive contributions of the OpenPKG
   GmbH to the RPM5.org project in 2007, the OpenPKG Framework will
   soon be available in a completely revamped RPM 5.0 based version.
   This will be the greatest technological upgrade in the 7 years
   of existence of OpenPKG. The upgrade will require some manual
   intervention by the OpenPKG instance administrator, but a reasonably
   smooth upgrade path from the current RPM 4 based OpenPKG-CURRENT will
   be provided, of course. Once this new RPM 5 based OpenPKG Framework
   is available the OpenPKG Packages will be upgraded to take advantage
   of its new features, too. Separate announcements will follow.

The OpenPKG organizations think that this way also in 2008 
OpenPKG will be able to continue delivering you the best 
cross-platform multiple-instance Unix software packaging solution 
you can get on the market for driving your business.

Yours,

OpenPKG.com  OpenPKG Corporation  OpenPKG GmbH
OpenPKG.net  OpenPKG Foundation   OpenPKG Foundation e.V.
OpenPKG.org  OpenPKG Project      Ralf S. Engelschall

______________________________________________________________________
OpenPKG                                             http://openpkg.org
Announcement List                         openpkg-announce@openpkg.org