Hello Fineract Community, In several quarterly updates to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) Board [1], a recurring concern has been noted—both by us and by the Board: the Fineract project remains closely tied to and dependent upon the Mifos project. This is an issue we need to actively address.
This is not a new observation. Many contributors, myself included, come from the Mifos community—after all, I founded the Mifos project in 2001. It’s deeply embedded in our collective history. However, from the perspective of ASF governance, this level of dependency poses a problem. For example, Apache Fineract® currently relies on the Mifos Admin UI (https://github.com/openMF/web-app) for visibility into its functionality. This is partly by design - we envisioned Fineract as a headless backend system and expected a plethora of vendors creating their own UIs on top of it. But what we missed is that the current web-app AdminUI is really a terrific expression of the surface area of the application; while theoretically there could be APIs that are part of fineract that are not in the Web-App, in reality none of those have been maintained. At one point, we even bundled the Mifos WebApp with the Fineract Docker image. However, this UI is not part of the Fineract project and cannot be released under its name. Per ASF policy, Mifos is considered a vendor, and all ASF projects must adhere to strict vendor neutrality. This means that Fineract needs its own complete, standalone solution—a user interface that allows the core platform functionality to be demonstrated and accessed independently. We need an AdminUI. To that end, I have two questions for the community: Does anyone have an alternative UI solution—fully independent and ready for contribution—that we can consider adopting under the Fineract project? If not, we’ll need to begin the process of defining requirements and planning a new UI component. I intend to make this process as open and transparent as possible, though we should expect it to take some time. I also believe that the new concept should allow for a more pluggable approach - to enable vendors to say "we base our solution on Fineract and we have the following add-ons", without having to make those components UIs separate from the base AdminUI. Let’s begin the discussion. If there are alternatives to this approach, I'm interested. Thanks, - James [1] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FINERACT/2025-04+%28April%29+Report+to+ASF+Board
