[midPoint] Evolveum priorities

[Radovan Semancik]

Dear midPoint community,

MidPoint project has gone through huge evolution during all these long 
years of its existence. Now midPoint is by far the most comprehensive 
open source identity management and governance system available on the 
market. MidPoint has a lot of features and it is very flexible. But it 
is also quite big: midPoint has more lines of code than all of its open 
source competitors combined. MidPoint is now more than a match for most 
commercial identity management and governance systems.

The scale and comprehensiveness of midPoint is great news for any 
midPoint user. But there is also another side. The maintenance of 
midPoint is no easy task. MidPoint is free and open source (FOSS) 
software with a vibrant community. However, vast majority of midPoint 
maintenance and development is done by a professional team at Evolveum. 
This is one of the reasons that midPoint could keep a very rapid 
development pace and maintain its quality during all these years.

MidPoint core team is a group of professionals that dedicate all their 
available time to midPoint maintenance and development. Being 
professionals the only income that we can use to pay our bills comes 
from midPoint itself. I'm happy to say that we were quite successful in 
2016 and there was a lot of new midPoint deployments. However, as 
midPoint is an free and open source software these deployments do not 
directly generate revenue that can pay the bills of midPoint core 
developers.

As most of you probably know Evolveum has a subscription program that is 
used to fund the development:

https://evolveum.com/support/

The subscription revenue is supposed to fund midPoint maintenance and 
development - and we had a moderate success with the subscription 
programs. While the subscription revenue is increasing every year it 
still does not cover all the maintenance, development and associated 
costs. Therefore have always used a portion of a developer's time for 
other purposes that supplement the funding. These were mostly midPoint 
deployment projects. These engagements reduce the time that a developer 
can use for midPoint development, maintenance, documentation - and 
especially the time that can be used for interactions with midPoint 
community. Despite all odds, probably due to some kind of space-time 
anomaly, we have been able to keep the community service levels quite 
high during all these years.

However, the increase of midPoint deployments in 2016 caused additional 
load for midPoint developers. MidPoint is unquestionably a great product 
which we are very proud of and we will do everything that we can to 
maintain and improve it. But we are still just human beings. There is 
only so much load that we can bear. Therefore we have decided that from 
now on we will have to prioritize our work. We had to do this to 
maintain midPoint quality: if we would try to do everything we will end 
up doing nothing properly. And we are determined to maintain midPoint 
quality as one of our higher priorities.

Therefore from now on we have to prioritize our work. Which includes our 
reactions in this mailing list. We will still promptly answer the 
questions of midPoint subscribers, sponsors and contributors. However it 
is "best effort" service for everybody else. Other community members 
will need to wait for their answers or it may happen that there will be 
no answer at all in cases that we are too busy. We are very sorry about 
this. This is very personal issue especially for me. But we have only 
24-hour day as everybody else.

The same principle also applies to community bug reports and feature 
requests: subscribers, sponsors and contributors will be strictly 
prioritized over other community members. To be completely honest the 
midPoint core team is currently extremely busy working on features 
endorsed by midPoint subscribers and sponsors. We have just finished 
planning of midPoint 3.6 release and it is extremely unlikely that any 
non-sponsored feature or any feature that haven't been endorsed by 
midPoint subscriber will be included in the 3.6 release. I will be 
updating our Jira to reflect that situation in a next few days. The 
situation is almost the same for bug fixes: we cannot guarantee that any 
non-subscriber bug will be fixed anytime soon - unless it is security 
vulnerability or a critical operation issue that impacts very large user 
groups. We will strongly prioritize fixes for bugs pointed out by 
midPoint subscribers. We have to.

To summarize: we will provide perfect service to midPoint subscribers. 
We are fully committed to this and we have reserved the capacity for 
this. However, we are running out of available capacity for community 
services. I'm sorry.

There is a clear way out of this situation: we need to expand the 
development team. However we need additional funding to do this. And 
there is a simple way how you can help: get midPoint subscription. 
Please support this incredible open source project. It is worth it.

Thank you.

-- 
Radovan Semancik
Software Architect
evolveum.com