[Genabel-announce] Discontinuation of the GenABEL project

[L.C. Karssen]

Dear GenABEL community, dear friends,

PolyOmica, the company which has provided financial support to the
GenABEL Project since 2011, has announced that it will discontinue their
support this year. We would like to thank PolyOmica for its generous
support of the Project, which made it possible for the community to use
the project for free during 2011–2017. As PolyOmica was our only
sponsor, we regretfully have to announce our stepping down as Project
leaders/community managers, as well as likely discontinuation of the
GenABEL Project in its current form. If you are interested in keeping
the Project (or some of its parts) going, please read on.

Writing software is one thing, but keeping it alive is another.
Maintaining a big software project in good shape has yearly costs of
about 20% of the project development price. In the case of GenABEL,
which is a large project with hundreds of thousands of lines of code and
documentation, the development cost according to the Constructive Cost
Model II (CoCoMo II) were several millions of US dollars. Consequently,
maintenance costs are in the order of hundreds of thousands of US
dollars per year. While for many packages the maintenance was provided
by individual developers, and large part of infrastructure and work was
provided free of charge by other open source projects (e.g. R-forge,
CRAN teams), over the last years, several core packages and the project
as the whole were surviving on approximately €5000-7000 per year. With
this budget we could only do the most basic and urgent maintenance and
little to no time could be spent on keeping the tools up to date and
adapt them to the continuing progress in the field of (gen-)omics.

Unless we can find a new sponsor, or an organisation which is willing to
take over the project, the only realistic future we currently see for
the GenABEL Project in its current form is to discontinue it. In case
you are interested in the project or some of its components, please
contact info at genabel.org. In your e-mail, please tell us who you are
(your organisation and position), which parts of the project you are
interested in (e.g. specific packages, forum, etc.), and why. If you
think that your organisation can contribute to the project in some form,
please write about this as well.

If no viable solution presents itself, the project in its current form
will be discontinued in phases: from now on, there will be no code
updates for the packages where PolyOmica staff are maintainers (GenABEL,
ProbABEL, DatABEL, MetABEL, filevector, MixABEL, OmicABELnoMM). The
forum and the GenABEL project site will be archived and taken offline on
November 1st, 2018. The Jenkins server has already been shutdown for a
couple of months. The source code and bug/feature trackers will remain
available as they are hosted on R-forge and GitHub.

It is with some sadness in our hearts that we have to send this e-mail.
We have enjoyed our work for the Project very much, and we would like to
sincerely thank those who contributed as developers, maintainers, bug
reporters, forum users, or in any other way, shape or form.

Best regards,
Lennart and Yurii


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L.C. Karssen
's-Hertogenbosch
The Netherlands

lennart at karssen.org
http://blog.karssen.org
GPG key ID: A88F554A
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