What is OpenPalette? 
OpenPalette is an invitation for collaborative efforts offered to third-party developers by Horizon Control Inc., the developers and owners of the commercial software used in Strand Lighting Palette line of consoles. The program is designed to foster an environment of cooperation with third party developers and vendors of other lighting related products. The end result of some projects are available free of charge to end-users while others utilize routines exposed by HCI to support better connectivity to our core fade engine and in themselves become commercial products sold by those same third parties.

 
What is Open Source?
The Open Source Initiative is a development methodology that offers practical accessibility to a product's source (goods and knowledge). Some consider open source as one of various possible design approaches, while others consider it a critical strategic element of their operations.

 
What Qualifies as Open Source and what part of Palette is Open Sourced?

Open source projects offer any developer (or user) access to programs (executables) AND the source code to compile and/or modify those executables at will.

The core Horizon Control engine that drives the Stand Lighting Palette range of consoles is not Open Source, but projects found and discussed here will either be fully Open Sourced or interact with elements of Open Source code already published by HCI. Find the official General Open Source Definition here, and a general discussion of Open Source here.

 
Our OpenPalette Methodology

In recent years, some lighting manufacturers have sought to build the 'ultimate' lighting console, capable of doing everything, meeting every user demand, satisfying every user request. Ultimately they fail because there will always be something someone wants that the console doesn't give them.

OpenPalette is a completely different approach that allows the Palette range of consoles to do what they do best at the heart of lighting a show: real-time, live editing and playback of cues in the high-pressure environment that creating a show often is.  The Open Source development lets others interact with the Palette resulting in a 'super tool' based on a family of programs that suit a design team's requirements. It is far better than spending all of their time typing the same data into lots of different programs - an approach that is tedious, repetitive, dull, and error prone.

OpenPalette offers several techniques by which theatre practitioners or other software developers can interact with Palette consoles: Palette's internal scripting system, based on the Lua open source language, allows anyone to create complex additions to Palette's functionality, whether that be importing a patch from Excel or creating automated show reports with show timing for stage managers. Telnet connectivity allows communication between Palette and external software in real time, useful for any number of functions - and already used to provide command line and channel selection display to the Virtual Magic Sheet application, dramatically extending its functionality. Finally, OpenPalette offers data export in formats suitable for software such as FocusTrack that allow semi-automated creation of show-documentation with focus descriptions and photographs of conventional and moving light focuses and lighting cue states, analysis of equipment (colour, gobo) usage within the show and much more; FocusTrack will also be able to control Palette to further automate the process of taking show documentation photographs, improving the speed and efficiency of that process.

The OpenPalette methodology demonstrates how the collaborative effort of many diverse developers can succeed where those of one company trying (and often failing) to build a product that does everything for everybody might not.

Truly great results come from collaboration....