Over a decade ago, the Harvard University Libraries took me on as a contractor to start work on JHOVE. Later I became an employee, and JHOVE formed an important part of my work. When I left Harvard, I asked for continued “custody” of JHOVE so I could keep maintaining it, and got it. Over time it became less of a priority for me; there’s only so much time you can devote to something when no one’s paying you to do it.
After a long period of discussion, the Open Preservation Foundation (formerly the Open Planets Foundation) has taken up support of JHOVE. In addition to picking up the open source software, it’s resolved copyright issues in the documentation with Harvard, really over boilerplate that no one intended to enforced, but still an issue that had to be cleared.
Stephen Abrams, who was the real father of JHOVE, said, “We’re very pleased to see this transfer of stewardship responsibility for JHOVE to the OPF. It will ensure the continuity of maintenance, enhancement, and availability between the original JHOVE system and its successor JHOVE2, both key infrastructural components in wide use throughout the digital library community.”
JHOVE2 was originally supposed to be the successor to JHOVE, but it didn’t get enough funding to cover all the formats that JHOVE covers, so both are used, and the confusion of names is unfortunate. OPF has both in its portfolio. It doesn’t appear to have forked JHOVE to its Github repository yet, but I’m sure that’s coming soon.
My own Github repository for JHOVE should now be considered archival. Go forth and prosper, JHOVE.
Mad File Format Science 