Dear Friends and Colleagues,

White Box Technologies wishes to announce its intention to establish a
non-profit Center for Open Source Building Energy Simulations (COSBES).
I admit the title may sound a bit on the grandiose side, but it
capsulizes my thinking on what may help our little world of building
energy simulations - a non-profit non-commercial center on simulation
programs and resources that's in the public domain.

My initial goals are very modest, but my long-range vision is for the
Center to be capable of significant software development and support,
but always open source. My first steps are simply to maintain an
open-source version of DOE-2.1E. DOE-2.1E has been effectively abandoned
by LBNL and DOE for close to a decade. I have assurances from LBNL that
it's only a matter of paperwork for them to make the program open
source, and have communicated to them my intentions without receiving
any objections.

So what would this support consist of, besides making the program and
source code freely available? That would of course depend on the
public's (your) interest and need, which is one reason for this
announcement! But for starters, I have a backlog of completed work that
have never been incorporated into the public release version of
DOE-2.1E, such as two-dimensional and combined response factors for
composite walls, a decent foundation model, and an improved weather file
format. In addition, I'm currently working on contract for ORNL to
incorporate AtticSim into 2.1E. Lastly, I have a license from LBNL to
continue working on my last major work there - a partially-completed
DOE-2 to EnergyPlus translator (doe2ep) that, funding pending, can be
updated to the current EnergyPlus release. Also in the works and soon to
be launched are (1) VisualEPlus, a graphical user interface for
EnergyPlus done by colleagues in China, and (2) actual-year weather data
service accessing NCDC's massive International Surface Hourly (ISH) data
base.

I had originally thought of calling a meeting at ASHRAE to make this
announcement, but then realized that finding a time to meet at ASHRAE is
an impossibility. However, I would be happy to entertain any questions
and comments while at the conference, where I'll typically be found in
TC 4.7 and 4.2 meetings. For course, I'm also open to questions and
comments posted on BLDG-SIM, although my responses will be somewhat delayed.

Joe Huang