It is with a certain sadness that we announce that we shall stop further development for the 3.6 branch of eFront by the end of 2015; this affects the open-source edition of eFront as well.
Our team will focus on eFront, our reshaped vision for the next-generation LMS. We will keep supporting customers of Educational and Enterprise eFront editions up to the end of 2016. We shall also offer ample opportunities to upgrade to eFront during this period.
References, downloads and support material for the open-source edition will be transferred to a new web-site during the next couple of weeks.
I would like to take this opportunity to talk a bit about eFront Open-Source.
At this moment we do not have any plans to offer an Open-Source version based on eFront core. It’s not that we don’t like Open-Source. We really do. Heck, eFront was built on top of several Open-Source projects, from PHP to MYSQL.
It’s just that merely giving a project away as Open-Source is not enough. Open-Source is not about the license, it’s about the community that is created around a project. In the case of eFront, while there was some interest in the FOSS edition, and we’d have loved to see a large community develop around it, there was never a huge uptake.
Whatever the reason for that, rather than keep piling up new editions of eFront FOSS to linger in open source limbo in some code repository, we decided to pull the plug, and focus all our efforts and resources on the commercial version of eFront.
Of course, existing FOSS-licenced eFront releases will continue to remain FOSS indefinitely, so if you’re happy with those you can install them as always and build upon them to your heart’s content.
We would like to thank each and every one of you that spread the word about eFront FOSS, helped with suggestions, bug fixes and translations or with direct support to other fellow users via the open-source forum. We had a good 8-year run.
And for those that want to convert to a commercial offering, eFront is a radically more modern, user-friendly and capable product that only gets better with each passing day.