Over the past couple of years releases of new official parts have been
less frequent than in the past. LDraw.org would like to apologise or these
delays and explain the reason why.

About two years ago LDraw.org decided to move to a new license scheme
(the Contributors Agreement) for the parts library. This new system has
numerous advantages, perhaps most importantly the fact that most parts
will now be distributable without having to include Complete.exe
and ldraw027.exe (a problem for many new users) and can be included
with other software without a separate parts installation.

It has been a huge undertaking tracking down old part authors and asking
them to agree to these new terms and a lot of people have put a huge
amount of work into making this happen. The process is slowly reaching a
conclusion now with the number of authors[1] (and parts by those authors)
nearing zero. Once these authors have been tracked down (or their parts
replaced by new versions) the entire library will be under the new
agreement which allows for consistency in future releases and allows
their release rate to be increased again.

As a further side effect of this process we need to update the header
information of parts which means the LDraw Standards Committee has
to validate a suitable format proposed by the library admins
for this new information. As anyone who has worked on standards will
know this is a difficult task although one that should be nearing
completion.

We thank you for not complaining about this and hope that in the mean
time you will download parts from the Parts Tracker to fill any gaps
you may have.

Tim Gould
on behalf of the LDraw Steering Committee

[1] If anyone can help find any of the following people this job will
be much easier to complete and we will be able to have a new parts
release sooner. Those marked by a star are most important to track
down as they have authored ten or more parts.

Chris Alano
Emiel Visser
Eric D'Aragon
*Fredrik Glöckner
Howard Lande
James Jackson
Jeroen Ottens
*Kevin Bane
Kiyoteru Fujiki
*Luis E. Fernandez
Marcel Peeters
Mark Riley
Rob ? (Authored part 30273)
Robert Sexton
Tim Romine
*William Wood