##December 14, 2009
Open source, oh yeah. As promised, today is the day that chaw is released to the public. I hope you find it as chawsome as I do. I am pretty excited with the possibilities of continued innovation that will come from the community.
###now
Chaw was first written about a year ago. Of course, over the last year a lot has changed. The code has become more stable and the opportunity is right for a new, open source application for source code and project management. As most of you know, Chaw was developed on CakePHP 1.3. Currently, the master branch of Chaw is stabilized on the 1.3-dev tag of CakePHP. The first item on the roadmap will be to upgrade to cakephp1x HEAD. For this reason, no package was created for this release. So to get the code you will have to `git clone`.
###next
Moving forward, I hope people will join #chaw on irc.freenode.net and start contributing. To this end, the roadmap will be finalized over the next few weeks. A great place to start may be with themes. Since CakePHP provides a nice theming system, we can easily modify the layout and views to match different styles. If you find some features lacking in your theme, then we can get those on the roadmap.
###license
You'll see by viewing the source that I chose the AGPL license. For this application, I felt it was important that developers be required to keep their contributions free and open to everyone. I am really interested to see if this will foster more collaboration. If you absolutely need more control over the source, we can probably work out some kind of commercial license.
###business
Over the last few years, we have seen many companies offer source code hosting for a fee to private projects. This has certainly helped those providers add features and continue to support their product. By going open source, I am hoping to take a different approach by utilizing community resources, and by providing commercial support. Chaw installation and setup is very easy. However, if you need some help that can be where the commercial support comes in. My email is in the source code, so feel free to send me a message. Also, I can provide services like setting up a Rackspace Cloud Server image with Chaw already installed and ssh setup properly. Ultimately, the real benefit of using your own installation is the complete control over your data. You own the code, you depend on it being available, you should have control over everything.
See you in #chaw.
~gwoo
