Response from Principal Investigator (Score 5, Informative)

As Dean of the USC School of Cinematic Arts and the Principal Investigator on the original Sophie grant, I'd like to share my own perspectives on what's happening with Sophie.

Sophie 1.0 was and is a collaboration between our School and the Institute for the Future of the Book (IF:Book). Sophie is intended to make it easier for anyone who is interested in authoring rich-media ebooks to be able to produce professional quality output with minimal training. Bob Stein, head of IF:Book and before that the founder of the Voyager multimedia company, is Sophie's visionary, and a longtime colleague and friend. Bob and I approached Mellon (note: The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Program in Research in Information Technology, not Carnegie Mellon, as someone suggested) for funding because Sophie's core constituency is also their core constituency: people in higher education institutions, libraries, museums, arts organizations, and wildlife organizations who want to author interactive content that makes extensive use of text, images, audio, and video. Mellon supported the project on the same terms as all software projects it supports; namely, that the software must be offered under an open source license, and that we must work to develop a sustaining, open source community for Sophie as part of our responsibilities.

Sophie 1.0 is written in Squeak, a Smalltalk variant. It implements Bob's vision, does what was promised to Mellon, and does it well. As a 1.0 product, there is still plenty of room for enhancement, and we had always intended to approach Mellon for additional funding for version 2.0. Unfortunately, despite a lot of interest among individual faculty and a few small programs, the widespread institutional adoption necessary to form a viable Sophie 1.0 sustaining community was not happening - due in large part, our inquiries suggested, to lack of interest in supporting an enterprise software application written in Squeak. In the community whose support was most essential to Sophie's survival, everyone wanted a language that was more widely known and used; the largest single group of potential adopters wanted Java

There's a long story about how it happened, but the short version is that IF:Book and USC asked one of the contractors that had helped write Sophie 1.0 - a Bulgarian firm called Axa Solutions - to write Sophie 2.0 in Java, so that it could be adopted widely enough to become a self-sustaining, community-supported open source project. Sharing our concerns about adoption, and continuing to believe in the project, Mellon enthusiastically supported our decision by making a grant for version 2.0 in Java. Sophie 2.0 is not just a Java rewrite of version 1.0: it is a true version 2, containing all the lessons learned in version 1 and substantially extending the functionality, which merely happens to be written in a different programming language.

Let me correct some inaccuracies in the comments I have read so far. No, I don't consider what we're doing to be forking the project, any more than any version 2 is a fork of version 1: Sophie 2.0 will even feature backward compatibility with Sophie 1.0 books (as well as an improved file-format, one of the lessons learned from Sophie 1.0). Yes, our solution uses a Bulgarian firm, Axa Solutions, as a contractor, but that is not as much of a change as it has been made to sound; as I mentioned, the Bulgarians were part of 1.0 development as well. No, the Bulgarian firm is not closing the code: they don't own the IP, we do, and we have signed a contract with Mellon to make Sophie available under an approved open source license. No, this is not a commercial undertaking in any sense: this is two not-for-profit organizations developing open source software with the help of a charitable foundation, to be sustained by an open source community of not-for-profit user-institutions like colleges, museums, and theaters. Apart from Axa Solutions, which is a contractor to us in the same way the rest of the original Squeak coders were contractors to us (including, I assume, the person whose complaint sparked this story), there is no for-profit entity involved. We would welcome open-source vendor participation in the Sophie community, to help institutions that need help supporting the product, but we are not in that business ourselves.

Perhaps most important, no, this was not a conspiracy against the original developers or the original project. This new version is being built with the support of the same institutions, leaders, and project manager that built the original version; only some of the contractors have changed. The Squeak contractors were understandably unhappy about the move to Java, both because they lost the contract and because they believe in Squeak and want to see it used more widely. We have the greatest respect for their capabilities and their enthusiasm for their community, but our responsibilities to our own institutions, our community, and Mellon require us to give Sophie the greatest possible chance of success. So far, our decision appears sound: we have already seen a significant increase in enthusiasm for Sophie 2.0 among the project's target audience, and we expect that the decision to move to Java will prove highly beneficial to the project's sustainability. That was, and is, our overriding concern.

I want to thank the Slashdot community for their interest in our project. I should note that I've paid particular attention to the complaints about the current web site: we're planning to do something about that as we work on version 2, as well.

Version 2.0 should be available next summer; version 1.0 is available now. Meanwhile, I hope this helps to address any confusion or misinformation that may be spreading.

Best,
Elizabeth Daley