[asac]AIPS++ Consortium Ends

[Al Wootten]

AIPS++ Consortium Ends

The members of the AIPS++ Consortium, the National Radio Astronomy 
Observatory, ASTRON, the Australia Telescope National Facility, the 
Jodrell Bank Observatory, and the Berkeley-Illinois-Maryland Array, 
announce the end of the consortium, effective immediately. The end of 
the consortium means the withdrawal of the resources currently 
committed, the end of joint management meetings, and the end of the 
consortium executive. The AIPS++ code base generated by the consortium 
remains available to all. The code base is covered by the GNU Public 
License, held by Associated Universities.

At this juncture, we would like to summarize the accomplishments of the 
consortium. Although our shared goal of developing the next generation 
radio astronomical data reduction software package has not been fully 
realized, the package does have the basic core capabilities for radio 
astronomy and has been used in various targeted applications. However, 
the Executive Committee has concluded that the consortium structure is 
no longer appropriate as we turn from building the core of the package 
to developing scientific applications targeted to our specific 
telescopes. Consequently, future collaboration between our observatories 
will be in the form of new bilateral or multilateral agreements and will 
focus on specific scientific needs.

The AIPS++ Executive Committee wishes to recognize all those who have 
contributed to the project over its entire lifetime. We thank all of the 
many very talented and dedicated people have been involved in the 
project in many different ways. We assure these people in particular 
that the core capabilities of AIPS++ will not be lost - as described 
above, we expect that future developments by our individual 
observatories will make appropriate use of the extensive functionalities 
in the AIPS++ package.

The AIPS++ Executive Committee:
Harvey Butcher, Tim Cornwell, Dick Crutcher, Phil Diamond, Ron Ekers, 
and Fred Lo (Chair)

April 21, 2003