It’s my understanding that the GPA was acquired by the electronic power group.
What does it mean for the future of GPA’s open source software (especially, GEP, openhistorian, openPDC and gsf), which is MIT licensed?
Thank you for raising this question. This matters greatly to me as well. I am the principal creator of openPDC and many of its related projects, so keeping these tools open and useful to the power and utility community has been a key part of my conversations with Electric Power Group (EPG). In those discussions, EPG has been very supportive of GPA’s continued open source development and our role as a responsible steward of these projects.
On licensing, these code sets have been released under various licenses over time, including the Eclipse Public License, the Tennessee Valley Authority Open Source Agreement, and MIT. Code that has already been released remains under the license it was released with, and anyone can continue to use, modify, etc. Reviewing licensing is part of good stewardship, so a future license change is always possible, for example to a copyleft license such as the GPL. However, if a license is ever changed for a given code set, it will remain an OSI-approved open source license.
With EPG’s encouragement, we are also exploring ways to strengthen this long-term stewardship role, including working with LF Energy, the Linux Foundation’s energy initiative, to help preserve and sustain these tools for the community. Although these discussions are at an exploratory stage, they reflect how seriously this responsibility is being taken.
GPA continues to exist as a separate entity, now wholly owned by EPG. While the ownership structure has changed, GPA’s commitment to serving the power community has not. This remains part of our central mission, and EPG supports it.
I’m optimistic about what this acquisition can mean for the community, and I look forward to continuing my work at GPA, as part of EPG, as an open source developer.
I appreciate you asking this openly. The community deserves clarity about the future of the tools it relies on, and I’ll share more as plans become concrete.
Thank you,
Ritchie
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