Contributor License Agreements

For all open source software projects, a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) determines which additional copyright license granted to the project by the developer. This includes a disclaimer and, because of the international nature of open source projects, a clause that determines which courts should apply what right to the agreement. A patent clause, in which a developer, for example, allows the use of his patents, can be found in the CLAs. Our CLAs are based on Harmony (HA-CLA-I) Version 1.0.

 

Open Hardware

NeXt group also provide open documentation of elevator or escalator devices developed and produced by members unter a free licence. An open hardware documentation can help to:

  • check the quality of a device
  • to write own software for a device
  • to develop compatible devices
  • ...

Some of this documentation is available for members only.

Special Interest Group Lift Cloud Solution founded

The connection of technical equipment to the cloud for the optimization of service and maintenance is a general trend. Elevators and escalators need regular maintenance, and cloud based lift monitoring offers many benefits.

Within the NeXt group, a working group has been set up with the goal of developing a manufacturer-independent standard for the networking of elevators and components.

The developed specifications are then released under a free license, allowing each manufacturer to integrate compatible interfaces into its products.

NXg CANopen Lift Connector

The topic of NeXt group SIG 'NXg CANopen Lift Connector' is the development of a specification & software of a manufacturer independent TLS encrypted connection of a CANopen Lift using a JSON based REST-API to access the object dictionary with ready specified access privileges, transported via the WebSocket protocol on a TLS encryption socket layer, using certificate based cloud server authentication.

How to found a Special Interest Group? (SIG)

NeXt technical groups are hierarchical structured. The top-level NeXt technical group is the NeXt Technical Committee (TC); sub-layered are the NeXt Special Interest Groups (SIG) and Joint Task Forces (JTF). JFTs are established jointly with other nonprofit associations. All these NeXt technical groups develop open source reference designs, software, specifications and recommendations. Each NeXt group member may participate in any group. The groups decide on consensus, meaning they discuss until everybody agrees on the compromise.

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Coding Guidelines

Following a consistent coding standard helps improve the quality of the overall software system. The key to a good coding standard is consistency. This consistency needs to be found within the standard itself (in other words, you need to make sure that guidelines don’t contradict one another) but also within the source code that uses the standard. Completed source code should reflect a harmonized style, as if a single developer wrote the code in one session.

At NeXt group we started to define the Coding Guidelines for the first software projects. 

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