We’re pleased to announce that Holger ‘CABAListic’ Frydrych has officially joined the OGRE Team as maintainer of the CMake build system and Linux platform. CABAListic is a long-time member of the community and has also been responsible for the Editable Terrain Manager add-on in the past. Most recently he’s been instrumental in implementing CMake for improving our build management in the development trunk (which will be in the next major version), and is a regular Linux user so will be the team’s main contact point for that platform.
Google have just announced the list of open source mentoring organisations that will take part in the Google Summer of Code 2009, the now world-famous open source internship programme, and we’re very honoured to be included in the list for the 4th year running!
The application process for students doesn’t start until Monday 23rd March, but now we’re confirmed as participating in the programme, now is very much the time to get prepared if you wish to apply for a place with OGRE this year. If you’re interested, make sure you read up on the programme, take a look at our Ideas List, get involved in the community, and take a look at our student application template – that way, when the time comes to apply, you’re fully prepared.
Many thanks go to Google for running this awesome programme once again, and allowing us be part of it.
Here at the OGRE project we’re obviously keen open source advocates, but we also live in the real world and therefore always like to make sure our license policies reflect what our users want. Our aim is that OGRE should be legally uncomplicated to use, while preserving the vital core principles that in return for using it, users must pass on the rights they receive to others, and be encouraged to contribute back to the project.
We recently performed a review of our licensing policy, and have decided to add a some explicit exclusions to the standard LGPL license conditions. The most important of these from a user perspective is that linking OGRE statically into your application is now subject to the exact same conditions as dynamically linking it. By default the LGPL treats these cases differently, and as a result most people dynamically linked, but on review we decided that our principles were adequately served by applying the same conditions no matter what the linking type, while at the same time making our open source license requirements much easier to explain. We also added some explicit notes about other situations (inline headers, configuration file changes, subclasses in external modules) that were already fairly well understood in the community, but which deserved to be mentioned explicitly.
We still believe that the LGPL is the most appropriate base license for a large library like OGRE, but we think adding these exclusions will make everybody’s life easier. Full details of the exclusions are on our Licensing Page. These changes will come into effect for all releases after 1st March 2009, or for anyone using the Subversion copy now.
The OGRE Team would like to apologise for the temporary downtime on this site, which has been forced upon us by malicious attackers.
We are restoring normal activity as quickly as possible. The site has undergone a completely fresh reinstall, software upgrade and where necessary complete software replacement. You may find a few things missing or unfinished, and old URLs may not always work anymore. We are resolving these remaining issues as quickly as we can.
In the meantime, you can still access downloads, patches and our subversion repository via our Sourceforge page. You can also follow the progress of the site reconstruction on Twitter
We’re glad to announce the first maintenance release of OGRE 1.6 (codename: Shoggoth), version 1.6.1.
As usual, there are plenty of bugfixes in this release, and in addition we have now officially switched over to a faster memory allocator by default (nedmalloc) – this was available in 1.6.0 but was not the default to allow for more testing before it was put live, which has now been done. This change makes it doubly important that you have read and understood the porting notes for 1.6, particularly the sections that mention memory allocation, since the use of a custom allocator would expose unresolved problems in your codebase if you didn’t address them during the 1.6.0 upgrade. Full details of the changes in this release are after the jump. (more…)
Google have officially announced that Google Summer of Code will be returning in 2009! While the application process doesn’t start for a few weeks yet, if you’re interested in participating this year, now is the time to start thinking about it, joining the communities involved, and thinking about what you might want to do. Every year we find that potential students who have already joined, actively participated, and ideally contributed to the community before the Summer of Code application process begins are far more likely to make good applications. So, if you think you’d like to apply to OGRE for 2009, now is the time to get involved in the community.
Important: despite the fact that OGRE has participated in GSOC for the last 3 years, there is no guarantee that we will be picked to participate in 2009, as there will be fewer participating organisations in 2009 compared to 2008.
