I enjoyed reading this and it is encouraging me to start digging into FREEMARKER-35 to try and help push it forward.
On Wednesday, January 04, 2023 22:47 +03, David E Jones <d...@dejc.com> wrote: Hi Shivaraj, Freemarker has not been moved to any sort of attic (the ASF has an official place for attic projects), and is not considered to be EoS/EoL. Those are markers set by developers to communicate the intended future. As for dormant, how do you define that? One thing to consider about roadmaps and Freemarker is that it is community driven open source. It is not commercial open source, so the only roadmap items that might exist are those that volunteers have added to the roadmap with the intention of contributing to that effort. Anyone can do that, even you. Because roadmaps are community driven they also tend to be informal for a smaller project like Freemarker (smaller in that there are currently a small number of people actively involved). While it’s important to look at activity in a project, the history is more important. The chances of Freemarker being completely dropped is unlikely, there are too many people using it. The biggest problem Freemarker has these days is that it is mature and already has one of the most comprehensive feature sets in any template language. It has support in all sorts of commercial and open source IDEs and other development tools. If you look at other libraries with a similar history and status, including various Apache Commons libraries for examples within the Apache Software Foundation, you’ll see similar patterns for mature projects. It does not mean they have been placed in an attic or been marked EoS/EoL. All it means is that millions of lines of code (or templates) are working just fine so most of the commit activity you see is small rare bug fixes and feature enhancements periodically by those enthusiasts who want to contribute. For myself and many of us using Freemarker, it is sufficiently important that if needed I could be more involved, and even if Freemarker was somehow shut down within the ASF (highly unlikely) it is likely that various people would get together to maintain a fork. This is the nature of open source software, and FWIW for projects with a long history and high status like Freemarker are far more reliably maintained over long periods of time than commercial software which only survives as long as the _owner_ is interested in it, as opposed to surviving as long as _users_ are interested in it. Once a piece of community-driven open source software I’ve never consulted with Ericsson, but have with various larger companies including some in Europe like BT and TomTom. Each company has different policies, but ultimately regardless of the written policy it is people you have to convince or reassure. These sorts of concerns about long term viability of software are common, one of many concerns in a software supply chain (including licensing, security, support, etc). Before about 15 years ago companies were far more worried about open source software in general and how reliable and durable it might be, but more recently that has shifted to where companies seem to be comfortable with open source, but often prefer commercial open source because it is more similar to commercial software terms and patterns they are familiar with. That is unfortunate, commercial open source is really just commercial software where at least one small part of it is available under an open source license. The lifecycle and development patterns tend to be the same as other commercial software, and very different from community driven open source software. The main way to tell the difference is that with commercial open source you’ll feel like a customer, and with community-driven open source you’ll feel more like a collaborator, a peer. That means no one who is acting in any sort of official role in the project is trying to hold your hand in order to sell you something. Nearly all of us who work on community driven open source software offer consulting services, and whenever we can those consulting services include development on the open source software we’re involved with, but the software itself is just software and it’s not for sale. I apologize for getting philosophical in answering your question, I tend to do that. The way I’ve come to think of this over years of discussions about it with other people is that community driven open source if far more difficult to evaluate than commercial software because there is no marketing department trying to resolve your concerns before you even consider them, but because the software is maintained by collaboration instead of by funding the questions change completely. Instead of questions about the viability of software related to its funding, what to look for is signs of collaboration and people who care about the project over time. That may include looking at commits, mailing list or forum activity, issues, contributions, and other places where people collaborate. My background is in higher level open source projects (Apache OFBiz and Moqui) that use lots of other open source libraries as they are application systems. For that sort of project library selection concerns are similar to concerns of other users, especially commercial and other organizations who are the target audience of these other projects so the libraries used WILL be reviewed and we regularly help with software supply chain research, security audits, etc… probably all the same stuff you’re working on now. If you really want to be thorough, for tool libraries like the Freemarker template engine you can even look for other open source and commercial software that uses it. While it’s a bit tricky to find good numbers on this, even mvnrepository.com <http://mvnrepository.com/> has basic usage numbers (mostly from other open source) you can use as an easy starting point, or an easy sufficient metric if you just want a rough indicator of open source use. Best wishes with your effort, and if nothing else count this email as a message from a Freemarker user who cares about the software. It’s one of dozens of such libraries that I use and care about so I, like many others, am only occasionally involved with the project, but it is one where I would step in and collaborate with others as needed because I rely on it and the alternative would be to do it all myself (plus whoever I’m working with on the need that comes up). That’s the main reason I’m on the PMC for Freemarker, but have never contributed much more than feedback. BTW, in this message I’m not speaking as a member of the Freemarker PMC, these are my thoughts as a fellow user of Freemarker. -David > On Jan 4, 2023, at 07:04, Shivaraj Sivasankaran > <shivaraj.sivasanka...@ericsson.com.INVALID> wrote: > > Hi All, > > > In Ericsson, we use Apache Freemarker-2.3.28 template engine in one of the > product to render web pages, as a Ericsson Policy it is strictly advised to > always use open source which is active and not to use projects moved to attic > or reached EoS. > On evaluating it is found that Freemarker was dormant, last and latest > release was on 2021-02-16. Is there any release planned ahead or in near > future? It will be good and help us to plan accordingly if you can share the > road map or next release information. > > Regards, > Shivaraj Sivasankaran.
