It’s been a long, long road, but the shiny new Kiwix-powered OpenDisc is ready for download. It seems quite a while since Yann Hamon first contacted us to say that Oxford Archeology had customised the offline Wikipedia disc to run the existing OpenDisc files.
This really struck a chord with me, as the existing backend was (almost amazingly) closed source software. Not that it was intended to be, merely that over the development of TheOpenCD the source files for the backend were completely lost. It felt like a terrible cheat to be promoting OSS when the software back-end was effectively orphan freeware.I
From there Yann helped shape the foundations of our Kiwix browser, spending odd hours with myself swapping files backward and forward ironing out the littany of quirks that unfolded as we got closer. Every time it seemed to be finished we’d find something else, so luckily by this time I’d contacted Emmanuel Engelhart (developer of Kiwix) who systematically identified and solved every single problem left. OpenDisc owes a lot to both Yann and Emmanuel, as it really couldn’t have been done this well and this soon without them.
During all of this, updates for OpenDisc still had to be developed, and subsequently they were more disparate than I’d really hoped for. At times it felt a bit like the delays from TheOpenCD era, but hopefully now that’s a thing of the past. 
I’d really like to thank Yann for having the original idea and helping shape it all in the beginning; Emmanuel for offering the expert advice that only a developer can give; and not to forget the others that helped out at throughout, like David Bolton, Peter Kemp, and especially everybody who downloaded and tested our original “Kiwix Test Release” to provide feedback when we thought we were almost complete.
Patrick Patience throughout this has helped keep the forums active and held the fort when I’ve been away with work. Although I’m sure he’s as busy as the rest of us, he’s agreed to take on a new role; Patrick’s now solely responsible for the selection of new programs on OpenDisc. With our plan to rapidly expand the disc now able to proceed at full-steam, Patrick will be keeping a keen eye on both nominations and OSS in the wild for new programs to fill the enormous amount of free space on the disc,II and help steer the future of the project.
The only rough edges that we didn’t fix before release is the slightly wonky screenshot viewer, which hopefully can improve for the next version, and the barebones homepage which will hopfully be more cohesive next time around. I didn’t think this version should have waited for everything to be perfect, as most of our returning visitors I’m sure would have soon been tired of updates about Kiwix.
There really is a littany of small changes to the disc, most of which will go unnoticed – we’ve even managed to replace the old common icons with Tango Project equivalents, which really finish off the new design.
With the hurdle of Kiwix behind us, I’m looking forward to seeing where we are six and twelve months from now.
