Unidata hosts a variety of Open Source software projects on GitHub. We use the Open Source model because we believe strongly that broad participation in all aspects of Unidata's work is essential to achieving the Unidata community's goals. Developing software that focuses on community needs is one of our main objectives, and participation by community members in all aspects of the development process — from coding to testing, documenting, and commenting — is incredibly valuable.

As community participation in Unidata's Open Source efforts grows, we are facing increasingly complex situations surrounding contributions made to Unidata-hosted projects. As a result, we have decided to begin requiring that community members who wish to contribute code to Unidata projects on GitHub agree to the Unidata Contributor License Agreement (CLA).

Unidata is pleased to announce that it will be maintaining a publicly-accessible code repository for the jj2000 software library. jj2000 is a JPEG 2000 encoder/decoder written in pure Java; it is used in the THREDDS Data Server (TDS) and the NetCDF-Java library to support JPEG 2000 compression in GRIB2 files.

JPEG 2000 is an image coding system that uses compression techniques based on wavelet technology. Unlike the older JPEG standard, JPEG 2000 can perform either lossless or lossy compression of data.

The netCDF team at the Unidata Program Center is happy to announce that the source code repositories for the netCDF C, Fortran, and C++ libraries are now publicly available on GitHub. The netCDF libraries join other Unidata projects including THREDDS, IDV, GEMPACK, and the LDM at the Unidata GitHub repository.