News 9. Sep. 2003: new packages 0.99.001 availible on our download-page on sf.net

Announcement of the eGroupWare fork

Based on the recent events (you surely have followed on den lists) Lars Kneschke, Reiner Jung and I (Ralf Becker) decided to fork phpGroupWare.

We are deeply displeased and frustrated about the way the project works at the moment and we have articulated this several times. We learned from the list, that not everyone shares that opinion, which is their full right. As we can't change the existing phpGroupWare project, we think that fork is necessary to create the project we want to be part of.

We want to create eGroupWare different from how phpGW is setup today:

• more open development (wiki access, cvs access, ...)
• active developers should steer the project and be encouraged to work (Pim Snel - the developer of iDots - is working on a document defining this more detailed / similar to the Debian social contract)
• relaxed license handling (these GNU fanatics are really sucking), we want to have a LGPL'ed API which allows to import other tool-classes with free licenses without relicensing / editing them
• we want to focus on a user friendly interface (java-script) and more on user demands
• phpGW apps should be unchanged installable as long as possible
• we want a HEAD branch, which allows to implement apps to run at least in the last stable release too (dont need to say, that this is important for sponsored / payed development)
• big steps like the XSLT-templates should be developed in a separate branch and merged back, and not stop the other development for ages
• we want 2-4 releases each year, with smaller improvement steps
• we will monitor the phpGW development in separate branches and merge interesting developments (I just finished a bot, which automatically imports all phpGW commits in our repository for easy merging)
• our first release will have the Version number 1.0 and will be released with the the announcement of the fork, probably on a big Linux Fair in Germany end of October 2003

==> we want to have more fun with the development

==> we want to make money with free software and sponsored development

Some phpGroupWare developers already joined us, some are still evaluating the situation or waiting if the elections will have any impact (which I personally doubt).

From my personal experience I can report, motivation and spirt in eGroupWare are really high and it's again a pleasure to code ...

Our best wishes for our old project phpGroupWare