Quartz Scheduler Project Status Update and Information

[jhouserizer]

Quartz Scheduler has a long history at this point - the initial FOSS code dating to 1998. In that time it has had many private contributors and contributors from several organizations, building up a rich feature set.

In the past several years the project has been "stewarded" by Software AG. Over the course of those years there were various fits of starts and pauses of project effort. Unfortunately in the most recent years of that there has been blockage of progress and effort on maintaining the project due to policy and procedure problems within Software AG (preventing among other things the acceptance of new contributions / outside contributors).

In July 2024, IBM acquired several products and development teams from Software AG. Quartz came along for that ride (as did Ehcache, Terracotta, and other FOSS projects). IBM is significantly more supportive of FOSS efforts.

In recent weeks the Quartz projects has had update copyright notices and updated contributing guidelines with simple DCO process. See https://github.com/quartz-scheduler/contributing/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md .

At this point (mid October 2024) there is some modest effort underway to get two releases made: the GA of Quartz 2.4.0 (maintenance line with Java 8+ support and javax dependencies), and the GA of Quartz 2.5.0 (maintenance line with Java 11+ support and jakarta dependencies).

We hope these releases will be achieved within a couple weeks (there is a significant backlog of issues to review and handle if requisite before the releases). There is also a fair amount of clean-up and updating to do around docs and website - and this may take some time (help welcome).

While the project is now more free and able to do things, there is a need for contributors and assisting maintainers in order to help ensure the momentum continues. Many thanks to the few recent contributors of PRs and the couple rather active "outsiders" that have been helping prod things along with PR reviews and etc.