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The Starlink Project, referred to by users as Starlink and by developers as simply The Project, was a UK astronomical computing project which supplied general-purpose data reduction software. Until the late 1990s, it also supplied computing hardware and system administration personnel to UK astronomical institutes. In the former respect, it was analogous to the US IRAF project.
The project was formally started in 1980, though the funding had been agreed, and some work begun, a year earlier. It was closed down when its funding was withdrawn by the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council in 2005. In 2006, the Joint Astronomy Centre released its own updated version of Starlink and took over maintenance; the task was passed again in mid-2015 to the East Asian Observatory. The latest version was released on 2018 July 19.
Part of the software is relicensed under the GNU GPL while some of it remain under the original custom licence.[1]