The Hare Krishna sacred calendar, full of festivals and holy days, is a lunar calendar, based on phases of the moon. In practice this means that the holy days, such as Krishna’s birthday, fall on a different Western solar calendar day each year.

VCal, the Vaisnava Calendar generating program that the Hare Krishna movement uses to calculate their sacred calendar, is going to be replaced.

I was approached by an intermediary to get involved in working on this program in 1997, so it has been some time coming. The old program, if I remember correctly, is written in some version of BASIC. It runs under MS-DOS.

According to the official website the redevelopment is because the underlying platform, MS-DOS, has become obsolete.

This program is a prime example of an opportunity for ISKCON to engage the open source development model.

There are many IT graduates in India and elsewhere in the world who have energy and talent that could be applied to this task, and other tasks besides.

By developing it using an open source model, a community of developers can be created around the program, and the knowledge of how it works can be documented and shared. This will enable future generations to implement it if the original development is ever stopped, for whatever reason.

By using a portable language that can be compiled or interpreted on multiple platforms the problem of platform obsolescence can be avoided for the future. A compiled language like C could be used, or an interpreted language like Java or Python.

This is also a fairly straightforward project that would make an ideal candidate for the initial foray into open source community building and facilitation.

Anyway, I’ve written to the relevant contact address with an offer of my services in this respect, and we’ll see what happens.