Center

The "Blackbox Center" is the non-profit voluntarily association dedicated to the mission, the vision and the values of Blackbox Center. Today, it is a de facto board of self-organized BlackBox developers, users and potential project managers. In the future, it could be necessary to transform the Center to a single entity, in order to provide better legacy basis for framework support, accumulation of donations and limitation of potential legal exposure of single project members. The members spearhead projects that, through a collaborative and meritocratic development process deliver enterprise-grade freely available software products that attract large communities of users. We operate under BSD 2-clause license to deploy our product to make it easy for commercial and individual usage.

Vision

The mission of the Blackbox Center is to provide software for the public good, based on the spirit, philosophy and technology put forth by Nicklaus Wirth and Jörg Gutknecht in the Project Oberon (the "Oberon Spirit". We do this by keeping alive, adapting and developing Component Pascal, Blackbox Framework and Blackbox Component Builder starting with the last official release (V 1.6) provided by Oberon Microsystems AG (the "software") and growing and maintaining an international user community.

Center mission

The Blackbox Center provides and ensures guidelines and policies to keep the community centered around the vision described above. As such, we are not the sole developers of the software, nor the only providers of the software, but we provide a clearing house to centralize efforts.

How are the Blackbox Center and its projects governed?

Currently, the 10 members decide issues by vote, with 80% constituting a quorum. Every vote needs the options "none of the above". Such a vote is counted for the quorum, but it does not take a side. For an option to be accepted, it needs 51% of the quorum.

Votes are called by the Chairman only (who is elected by vote on a yearly basis), whose responsibility it is

• to start a voting thread after sufficient prior discussion;
• to make sure that each member is informed about pending votes (at least about important questions);
• to make sure that each member voted
• to close the voting thread

New members can be added by vote, if necessary.

Contributions to the software come from the wider community, and the Center members decide which additions are added, and when, in compliance with our mission, our vision and our values.

3. The application about new membership in the "center" approved by voting with preliminary minimum of X days discussion. For the discussion applicant should give information about it self in the form of motivation essay: a self introduction, why he wants to join, what his current affiliation is, what his relationship to BlackBox Component Builder is.

Center tasks

• to make first version version with all known bugfixes