As stated before, The HOME Project is a project to develop a database application for Habitat for Humanity affiliates in the United States. HOME will help Habitat affiliates track information pertaining to local Habitat homeowners. Specifically, HOME will track the mortgages of each homeowner, and tracks other important homeowner information. It is our hope that such a database application will relieve Habitat affiliate office staff much of the tedious labor possibly involved with their current system. HOME will also improve the quality, quantity, and usability of homeowner information.
HOME is Open Source Software. That means that anyone may download HOME along with it's source code, and modify it for their needs (if they know how, of course). To learn more about Open Source software, visit the Open Source Initiative website at www.opensource.org, and/or the GNU website at www.gnu.org
HOME was origionally started as a team project for a Database Applications course at Messiah College, in Grantham PA in the Spring of 2003. It's original target affiliate was Harrisburg Habitat, but it became clear very quickly to the original HOME development team that HOME could benefit many affiliates nation wide. Consequently, HOME has moved from an academic setting to the great Sourceforge.net Open Source project hosting site.
Even though two members of the original development team have graduated, and most of them have moved on to other, greater things, the HOME project lives on, and is under continued development.
HOME uses the following open source technologies:
HOME is being developed in a Linux Environment, but will be able to run in many environments, thanks to Java being highly portable.
Since the beginning of the HOME Project, the development team has keep extensive documentation on HOME, and on it's development progress. This documentation is stored on our Project Wiki, and is open to anyone who would like to dive into the gorry details of the HOME Project.
HOME is Licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL). The development team decided to use the LGPL instead of the GPL for many reasons, but the main one is that the technology that HOME uses are under various licenses themselves, and the LGPL is more compatible with them than the GPL is. A copy of the LGPL is available here.