ACS (originally "ALMA Common Software") is a control framework that provides general purpose distributed system functionality. It was developed starting in early 2000s for the Atacama Large Millimeter/Sub-millimeter Array (ALMA) radio astronomy observatory. It has also been released under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), allowing other projects to use it and people from other multiple institutions to collaborate in and contribute to its development. This repository maintains the open-source version for the broader ACS Community. The community wiki provides relevant documentation and references to shared resources, while this page defines the general organization of the community.
The "ACS Community" (or "Community" from here onwards) is defined as the group of ACS users and voluntary Community Branch contributors. A list of projects currently using ACS is maintained here.
The community maintains this Community Repository, containing all LGPL released modules of the ACS framework. Patches coming from both ALMA and the broader community are regularly integrated to the Community Repository, according to the procedures described below.
Following the git philosophy each community member is welcome to fork the repository and make changes as desired for their individual applications, while considering sending general purpose patches back to the Community Repository. This repository contains a working version with tested and peer-reviewed changes that should serve as the reference for the whole community.
The main communication platform is github, i.e. wiki for documentation and procedures and issue tracker for technical discussions, bug reports and feature requests. Additionally, important announcements are made through the acs-community-announce mailing list.
Current ACB members (November 2014 to November 2015):
The role of the ACB is to develop the initial ACS Community policies and procedures and to ensure it grows as an all-inclusive fruitful and useful collaboration for its members. The ACB will be active for 2 years, at which time an election process to replace or confirm the original Board members should be in place.
Among the initial tasks of the CCB:
ACS is licensed under a GNU Lesser General Public License. For details, see the licenses/LICENSE.rst file in the ACS repository.