JHOVE 1.22 Release Candidate 2 is available today (April 2).
An issue which was noted but isn’t fixed in this release is the handling of the command line parameters. I don’t think that code has changed significantly since I worked on it. It’s so old that it was already there when I took over the project in 2005, so don’t blame me. :) Hopefully version 1.23 will have revamped command line handling using a modern code library.
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Tagged JHOVE, Open Preservation Foundation
Open Preservation Foundation has scheduled an online hack week for JHOVE. The focus for this one will be on development. Another hack week is planned for September, focusing on documentation. JHOVE just keeps going and going, and this is a chance for volunteer Java developers to reduce its issue list.
JHOVE is still alive and active! The Open Preservation Foundation is holding a workshop on “Getting Started with JHOVE” on January 25, 2019 in the Hague, Netherlands. The announcement says, “This workshop is aimed at beginners, or anyone who is new to JHOVE.”
OPF members get priority for registration.
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An Open Preservation Foundation webinar, “Putting JHOVE to the acid test: A PDF test-set for well-formedness validation in JHOVE,” will be held on November 21, 10 AM GMT (that’s 11 AM in Central Europe and a ludicrous 5 AM or earlier in the US).
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I’ve just learned that the Open Preservation Foundation is hosting a JHOVE Online Hack Day on October 11. I’m flattered people are still interested in the work I started doing over a decade ago, though getting some paying work would be far more satisfying.
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The Open Preservation Foundation has just announced JHOVE 1.14. The numbering is a bit odd. Version 1.12 never made it to release, and they seem to have skipped 1.13 entirely.
This includes three new modules: the PNG module, which I wrote on a weekend whim, and GZIP and WARC modules adapted from JHOVE2. The UTF-8 module now supports Unicode 7.0.
The release isn’t showing up yet on the OPF website, but I expect that will happen momentarily.
It’s nice to see that the code which I started working on over a decade ago is still alive and useful. Congratulations and thanks to Carl Wilson, who’s now its principal maintainer!
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Tagged JHOVE, Open Preservation Foundation, preservation, software
I’ve received an email reply from Becky McGuiness at Open Preservation Foundation to my query about JHOVE’s status. She says that VeraPDF has been taking all the development resources, as I suspected, but that work on JHOVE (in particular, fixing the expired installer) will resume soon.
Update: Here’s a response from Carl Wilson at OPF on the status of JHOVE. It says that the next version will jump from 1.12 to 1.14 (triskaidekaphobia?) and will include several new modules, including my PNG module.
I’ll second Carl’s call for institutions to become OPF supporters. As someone on Twitter said recently, open source software is “free, as in kittens.” It costs money to maintain it. Occasionally people support free software for the sheer love of it, but developers do need to earn a living.
Update 2: OPF reports that JHOVE installer has been fixed.
JHOVE 1.12 will be the first release of JHOVE that I had no significant role in, but I’m still glad to see that the beta release is now available. I’ve downloaded it, run the installer (yes, there’s now an installer!), and then launched JHOVE without having to edit any configuration files by hand! That’s a huge advance by itself. Nice work by Carl Wilson and everyone else at the Open Preservation Foundation. It’s now built with Maven, and I’m sure that the building process is much better than the clunky old one.
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Files that Last: Digital Preservation for Everygeek, an e-book to bring the message of digital preservation to the broader geek world.
Mad File Format Science 
Is JHOVE dead in the water again?
See this post for important updates.
I think what’s happened is that the Open Preservation Foundation’s very limited resources were pulled onto VeraPDF. That’s certainly a worthwhile endeavor, but it irks me that I handed support of JHOVE over to OPF only to see the ball dropped. I did some work on a PNG module a month ago and submitted a pull request; nothing’s happened since then.
I wouldn’t mind picking JHOVE up agin, but I’m going to be blunt about this: I’m done with working on it for free. If institutions that want JHOVE to be maintained really care about it, they should put up some money, whether it’s to OPF, to me, or to someone else. Open source software isn’t something that magically happens because people love to work without pay.
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