User manual

13 History and Development

13.1 Product history

XCSoar started as a commercial product developed by Mike Roberts

(UK), where it enjoyed a successful share of the market for several

years and going though several releases, the last being Version 2.

Personal reasons prevented him from being able to continue sup-

porting the product and so in late 2004 he announced the licensing

of the source code to the GNU public license, as XCSoar Ver-

sion 3. A support website on Yahoo Groups was set up and the

open source project started to gain interest and input by develop-

ers.

In March 2005 the program was substantially enhanced and this

resulted in Version 4.0 being released. By this time, coordination

of the various development efforts on the source code became dif-

ﬁcult and time-consuming, so it was decided to move the project

to SourceForge, whereby all the software work could be managed

by a concurrent version management system.

In July 2005, Version 4.2 was released which addressed some

compatibility issues that were experienced with certain PDA and

GPS hardware conﬁgurations.

In September 2005, Version 4.5 was released. This contained ma-

jor enhancements to the user interface including the introduction

of the ‘input event’ system and language translation ﬁles.

In April 2006, Version 4.7 was released to Altair customers. This

contained stability and performance enhancements as well as many

bug ﬁxes; and a new method for handling dialogs based on XML

ﬁles.

In September 2006, Version 5.0 was released on all platforms, Al-

tair, PC, PDA. This version contains many improvements and new

features and is based on extensive testing in ﬂight and in simula-

tion.

13.2 Get involved

The success of the project is the result of many kinds of contribu-

tions. You do not have to be a software developer to help.

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