two small milestones

[Robbie Morrison]

Hi all

In ten days time, the deeco codebase will reach its 20th birthday — as the first open source energy systems framework.

I added a GPL‑2.0‑or‑later software license to deeco on 24 February 2003 and subsequently tried to build an online community. About 8 or so people signed on but no one did any real development.

It was a pretty tough environment however: no version control, SSH into a 24 lines × 80 columns terminal, commercial UNIX, build and run on the command‑line, and of course the dense C++ codebase. Small edits could be done remotely using vi or, alternatively, one could drag back source files to your local machine, where at least emacs supported ad‑hoc CVS revision control.

deeco was conceived by Helmuth Groscurth — who wrote a forerunner in the Pascal language named ecco — and later implemented by Thomas Bruckner circa 1995.  One of my contributions was porting the codebase from HP workstation hardware to Intel x86 architecture.  Some time later, SCO stopped supporting key programming libraries — so that was technically the end of the project, although the project itself was bleeding momentum in any case.  Nonetheless, an object lesson on proprietary dependency and the associated loss of software freedom.

I later heard that the TU Berlin hierarchy complained about this giving away of valuable IP — but I was never told the details.  The code is on GitHub for archival reasons:

• https://github.com/robbiemorrison/deeco
  

deeco was also notable for being (to the best of my knowledge) the first high‑resolution contiguous time energy systems model applied to national energy systems — whether open or closed source. It also predated the next generation of open source energy systems frameworks by about five years.  More background here:

• Morrison, Robbie (April 2018). "Energy system modeling: public transparency, scientific reproducibility, and open development". Energy Strategy Reviews. 20: 49–63. ISSN 2211-467X. doi:10.1016/j.esr.2017.12.010. CC‑BY‑4.0 license.

The deeco manual is attached (in German) (indeed, some of the characterizations might still be useful for oemof?):

• Bruckner, Thomas (2001). Benutzerhandbuch ''deeco'' — Version 1.0 [User handbook ''deeco'' — Version 1.0] (in German). Berlin, Germany: Institut für Energietechnik (IET), Technische Universität Berlin. doi:10.5281/zenodo.5148149. 239 pages. Unlicensed.

Also, in just over two weeks, the Wikipedia page on open energy system models will have its 10th birthday on 2 March 2023:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Open_energy_system_models&action=info#Edit_history

I started that page to provide more visibility for this domain and continue to contribute to the editing.

Perhaps we might drink a round to these events at the upcoming openmod workshop in Vienna?

kia ora, Robbie

-- 
Robbie Morrison
Address: Schillerstrasse 85, 10627 Berlin, Germany
Phone: +49.30.612-87617

[Mark Howells]

Pure Awesomeness, Robbie!! Certainly, worth a toast ... or three!! Best, Mark 

Sent from Outlook for Android

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From: openmod-i...@googlegroups.com <openmod-i...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Robbie Morrison <robbie....@posteo.de>
Sent: Tuesday, February 14, 2023 9:21:16 AM
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Subject: [openmod-initiative] two small milestones

 

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