Hello all,
This message will be crossposted on both the pylinac and QATrack+ google groups.
We have an exciting announcement we want to share with you all. For several years now, pylinac and QATrack+ have been actively developed (well, QAT anyway =) and had an active and supportive community. It was natural that the two projects fit together, and there has been increased synergy between the two. On behalf of Randy Taylor and myself (James Kerns), we’d like to thank you, the community, for your awesome inspiration and help in making these projects what they are today.
In the last year or so, Randy and I both joined Radformation. Randy had a one-man company hosting QATrack+ and was successful in that venture; so successful that he was “aquihired” by Radformation! During our time here, we have been working hard on a machine QA solution. This product is based on the QATrack+ and pylinac libraries and is web-hosted. This is largely an extension of Randy’s initial idea of providing QATrack+ services to customers, but with a lot more integration of image processing (pylinac) as well as a larger number of quality of life improvements. We’re excited to share this with you and hope you can join us on this journey. The product will be added to the Radformation product suite and includes the world-class support Radformation is known for.
We also understand that many of you may be worried about the future of these open-source projects. Randy and I are committed to keeping the open-source solutions alive and well and have worked with Radformation on a future that we think is fair to everyone. Radformation is supportive of keeping pylinac and QATrack+ alive and believes there is value to the community in continued support of the open-source projects as well as in the offering of a commercial product. The process described below was created to help guide us on our open contributions going forward.
The TL;DR is that pylinac will stay almost completely open-source and QATrack+ will remain open source, but there will be private features developed under the Radformation roof. How those decisions were made follows the decision tree included below. The underlying principle is that the private features are convenience features. In other words, users will retain all the critical functionality to accomplish all the core work necessary to do QA. A few examples following this decision tree: A bug is found in QATrack+; this will be open sourced. A new commercial phantom analysis is added to pylinac; this will be open sourced. An alternative method for creating tests is generated; this will be closed source.
We will still be here in the forums and you can still file tickets and issues like normal.
If you would like to see what we’ve been working on for the past year, please sign up for our upcoming RadMachine webinar.You can also see our landing page for RadMachine.
Finally, Randy & I would like to express our gratitude to Radformation for their support of these projects.
Thanks,
James & Randy
