The JuliaBase project

JuliaBase is an open-source project in the spirit of Free Software. As such, its community is equally open. Our first goal is to have a large community of people adapting JuliaBase to their institutions. While working with JuliaBase’s source code, these people will probably make improvements. Our second goal is to encourage everyone to contribute these improvements to the public JuliaBase code. This way, everyone can benefit from the improvements of everyone else!

The home of JuliaBase is its home page. The domain name “juliabase.org” is registered to the Research Centre Jülich, Germany, which also hosts the site. However, the content of the home page, including all logos, is part of JuliaBase’s source code and licensed as Free Software. The current maintainer of JuliaBase is Torsten Bronger, bronger@physik.rwth-aachen.de.

  • Most importantly, JuliaBase’s full source code is organized as a public source code repository.

  • Also on GitHub is our bug and feature tracker.

  • We have a public mailing list at GoogleGroups. This is both for discussions about the development process as well as general questions. We recommend that you subscribe to this list before sending emails to it. (You don’t need a Google account for this. Ask the maintainer if you have questions.)

  • For Usenet fans, this mailing list is also available on Gmane as a newsgroup.

  • On irc.freenode.net is our IRC chat room called #juliabase.

  • The translations are coordinated on Transifex

Licenses

JuliaBase’s core is licensed under the terms of the Affero GNU Public License (AGPL).

The following files, however, are distributed under the terms of the less strict GNU General Public License (GPL):

  • The top-level files settings.py, wsgi.py, manage.py, urls.py, and log.py

  • All files below institute/ (the “institute” app)

  • remote_client/jb_remote_inm.py

  • remote_client/delphi/juliabase.pas

  • All files below remote_client/examples/

Finally, the “mimeparse” module is distributed under its own terms stated at the start of the respective file.

What does this mean?

It effectively means:

  1. You can download, run, and modify JuliaBase freely.

  2. You can use all files that serve as examples (in particular, the “institute” app) as a starting point for your adaption of JuliaBase.

  3. You can offer a JuliaBase web service in your institute, company, or whatever, as long as you also offer the JuliaBase source code, including your modifications, for download for your users. You can fulfill this requirement by contributing your modifications to the JuliaBase project.

  4. The GPL ensures that you do not need to offer the files of (2.) for download or to contribute them, as they may contain confidential material. Besides, they will change often, so it would be a hassle.

This rather elaborate licensing is done in order to have maximal convenience and flexibility for people who adapt and use JuliaBase, while strongly encourage them to contribute improvements of JuliaBase itself back to the community at large.

Thus, have fun using JuliaBase behind closed doors, but if you improve it, please send patches to the JuliaBase maintainers so that everyone benefits. Thank you!

Short project history

JuliaBase was started in 2008 in one institute of the Forschungszentrum Jülich under the name of “Chantal” by Torsten Bronger. In 2009, Marvin Goblet was hired as a full-time programmer for Chantal. In 2013/14, three further institutes in Jülich created Chantal deployments, and with them, further programmers joined the team. The core of the source code was separated from the institute-specific parts and re-branded as “JuliaBase”. This name is derived from Iuliacum, the Latin name of Jülich, where JuliaBase was contrived.