Dear AirTime community,
As Sourcefabric mentioned in their recent statement, their development efforts are concentrating on the SaaS offering of Airtime.pro. For a while now, changes are not being merged back into the open source branch of AirTime and the branches have started to diverge heavily. While Sourcefabric in principle wants to continue to support the open source branch of AirTime, they are prohibited from doing so for financial reasons. Effectively, the development of the open source version of AirTime has come to a stop.
We as broadcasters depend on a continuously updated and maintained version of AirTime. Sourcefabric offered three solutions in their statement: 1) Wait for them to have time to merge SaaS features back to the open source version 2) Start using the SaaS offering Airtime.pro 3) Fork AirTime and continue development independently.
For the last two years, we have hoped for solution 1. However, since no progress seems to have been made, we have decided to fork the project. This will enable us to coordinate our development efforts and will enable AirTime to continue to evolve as an open source, on-premises solution.
The undersigned contributors have begun undertaking the necessary steps to start this endeavour under the moniker ''LibreTime''. We aim to create a community managed radio solution with an active developer community that is both easy to install and use. There is also a taiga where we have started to coordinate.
We invite everyone to join our efforts of becoming a friendly inclusive community of stations from around the globe that use, document and improve LibreTime. Join us in fixing bugs and in defining how we manage the codebase going forward.
We believe that AirTime offers a solid foundation for an excellent online and terrestrial radio broadcast infrastructure, and are very grateful that Sourcefabric offered it to the world in the spirit of libre and open source software. In this same spirit, we aim to use this offer and adapt it to our current needs. If in future Sourcefabric has the capacity to spend developer time on merging features back from their SaaS-branch or offer any other kind of collaboration, we are very open to discuss any potential for cooperation as it arises.
Kind Regards,
Lucas Bickel, Radio Bern RaBe
Robb Ebright, WCRS-LP
Markus Roth, Radio Bern RaBe
Jean-Marie Favreau, Radio Campus Clermont-Ferrand
If you want, i could help in integrating RDS in FM and DAB+ outputting.
For dab+ i also made some multiplexers (more stations are mixed togheter in a single digital radio channel) for local radio stations in Italy.