ADVISOR and Advanced Vehicle Simulator is now a 100% Community Supported Open-Source Project

[Michael P O'Keefe]

Forgive the duplicate post...

Dear ADVISOR Community:

We would like to announce that ADVISOR is now a 100% community-supported open source project.

ADVISOR was released as open-source software in January of 2012 by the US Department of Energy's (US DOE's) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) with Big Ladder Software LLC as the designated project custodian. A huge vote of thanks needs to go to NREL for showing the courage and leadership to let their code become open-source software. Big Ladder Software was excited for this opportunity as well. Big Ladder Software does training, support, and consulting related to EnergyPlus, the commercial building energy performance simulation engine (also funded by the US DOE), and so it was thought that ADVISOR could be supported in the same way.

While at Big Ladder Software, ADVISOR was updated to work on the latest Matlab/Simulink and steps were taken to get it to also run on Mac OS and Linux in addition to Windows. We also posted the project documentation on-line and put the source code under version control and created other features such as this user forum.

In February 2014, after over two years of supporting the tool, Big Ladder Software has decided to discontinue its direct involvement with ADVISOR mainly due to the departure of key staff from the company. However, Big Ladder has graciously provided the resources and blessing to allow ADVISOR to continue on as a community supported tool and the ADVISOR community would like to graciously thank Big Ladder Software for their efforts -- if it wasn't for Big Ladder, ADVISOR would not have been available for these past two years.

So what does it mean to be a "100% community supported project"? Well, basically that means that there is no longer any one company directly supporting the tool and development staff. All support going forward will come from volunteer effort from the project maintainers and community. This includes maintaining the mailing list and also providing for future bug fixes and feature development.

What does this mean to you? In the short term, we don't expect any notable changes. The user forum will continue to be supported as usual (we would like to thank ImagineMade LLC for providing some time to allow Michael O'Keefe to continue to support ADVISOR).

How can you become involved? We would like to involve more people to help with the project and plan to release guidelines in the near future for how you can get involved. For now, if you are interested in becoming involved, the best thing you can do is stay active on the mailing list.

One request I ask going forward as the mailing list becomes more active is that we try to bring more discipline to asking questions on the forum. Answering questions on the forum takes time and that time could be better spent fixing bugs and improving documentation. Therefore, I'd like to suggest the following checklist to look over before you post a question:

(based on http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html)

1. Try to find an answer by searching the archives of this forum.
2. Try to find an answer by searching the Web.
   
3. Try to find an answer by reading the documentation (http://adv-vehicle-sim.sourceforge.net/).
   
4. Try to find an answer by searching the ADVISOR reports hosted at NREL (http://www.nrel.gov/publications/ use keywords "advisor vehicle").
   
5. Try to find an answer by inspection or experimentation.
   
6. Try to find an answer by asking a skilled friend.
   
7. If you're a programmer, try to find an answer by reading the source code.
   

If you see a question someone has asked and you think you know the answer to it, test out your thoughts and feel free to post an answer.

We look forward to working with the community to keep ADVISOR maintained and available for use in your simulation work.

Sincerely,

Michael O'Keefe on behalf of
The ADVISOR Project