History
GRAS was created to improve both the usability and capabilities of GNU Radio. The work began in Winter 2011/2012 and continued until the summer of 2013. I worked on GRAS for a year and half, over 1000 hours in total. The projects was developed 100% publicly on this github account. GRAS was made available to the community under the Boost license.
- I was never tasked by anyone to create GRAS
- I developed on GRAS on my personal time only
- I was never compensated for creating GRAS
- I only used my own PCs for GRAS development
Here is the first official announcement to the GNU Radio mailing list:
At the close of the summer of 2013, I terminated my involvement in the GRAS project due to a licensing and copyright dispute from my employer. The dispute arose after the vast majority of features had been completed. My employer requested that I make changes to the project's licensing. Community members who forked the GRAS repository on github were asked to delete their forks:
Hi all -
We are working on restructuring Gras & GRExtras at the moment. You may have noticed that Josh has pulled down his own copies of them for the time being.
As part of the cleanup effort, we would like to take down existing forks of the code to prevent the "fork network" from growing. If you all wouldn't mind taking down your forks from Github, that would be great. We will let you know when the process is done and a new version is re-posted.
I released GRAS to the community under the Boost software license. To continue my employment I was expected to sign this contract, which would among other things, change the license rights available to the community. I felt that this act was immoral and I quit the company to protect those freedoms for all.
GRAS was an incredible project. It shows what someone can do with a vision and dedication. Even now, as of 2014, GRAS still contains valuable performance capabilities and usability features. For example, GRAS has zero copy support for DMA devices and computation offload. And it can save users massive amounts of development trouble and build time, as it avoids the need for users to deal with swig entirely.
GRAS is still available to the community under the Boost license. Everyone is welcome to use it, learn from it, or improve it. However, due to the stress of the dispute I am no longer involved in maintaining or developing GRAS.
The spirit of the GRAS software; both its unique features and the endeavours of the author continue on in the Pothos project.