phpGroupware is unfortunately kinda dead these days, whereas eGroupware seems to have managed to keep some momentum.

Of course we had preferred keeping with phpGroupware when the two projects initially switched apart, in particular because the GNU project-linked QA/copyright policies were a guarantee that our contributions may be better protected in such a collaboration environment (we tried and help the phpGroupware as much as we could, btw, and parts of this history is told when looking at : http://www-public.it-sudparis.eu/~berger_o/weblog/tag/phpgroupware/).

But the copyright policy is not all about successful collaboration, and it happens that phpGroupware fails to deliver from quite a few months now. Btw, I’m not so close to the project to tell exactly what’s happening and why, but looking at the mailing-lists, at least, the situation looks very bad.

So I dare say it lound : the phpGroupware project is quietly dying (at least from my point of view).

But as we need some improvements that were initially planned for its 0.9.18 release (filemanager, accounts, various stuff I’m not really qualified to list completely)… we need to consider what the options are…

And fortunately, it looks like eGroupware has not forked in a too much differing way, from a technical point of view, and that they have even improved some of the things we expected to be coming from phpGroupware 0.9.18.

So it’s very much likely that we’re going to try and switch to eGroupware for some parts of the platform to be deployed in the next month.

This may not concern the whole of the PicoForge infrastructure but only a particular project that builds on top of the current PicoForge infrastructure, with some variations.

As for the future of PicoForge as the libre software forge, it’s not really clear what’s gonna happen, but I think that we may be making a more radical switch some day, for instance by forgetting the old legacy PHP code, and so neither depending on phpGroupware nor eGroupware, but using some more modern tools/frameworks (and why not something like Tine 2.0 ? … no, but we may be inspired by some of its characteristics .

Qui vivra verra.