After a long silence from our side, we are happy to announce that we are able to restart work on OpenAppStack!
Around August 2020 we were forced to stop working on OpenAppStack. The Open Technology Fund, our source of income, was suddenly withheld around $20 million by new leadership that was put in place by the Trump administration. If you have missed this and would like to read more about what happened, this article is a good place to start. After what has been a very intense fight, we are happy to see that they are back on their feet and accepting applications again!
And there is more good news! During OTF’s struggle, an Internet Freedom Support Fund has been set up, backed by organizations like the Ford Foundation and Luminate Group. The OTF has helped us transition our contract to the Internet Freedom Support Fund, which means that we are ready to finish the job we started almost three years ago already.
Additionally, we have received new funding from the Prototype Fund. This allows us to work on things that we have wanted to do for some time, but were not part of our initial planning.
All in all, this means that our team is back in action starting this month, March 2021! Because development has been almost completely inactive in the past half year, our first priority is to get all the applications that are part of OpenAppStack up to date. We are looking into Kratos to improve our user management/single sign-on solution. Lastly, we will make some more CI pipeline improvements so we can start developing some new features in the next months. Which features that will be exactly, will be anounced in our next posts.
If you want to know exactly what we are going to work on, you can check out our issue board on GitLab.
Lastly, there is a new way to reach us. If you want to join the discussion about the future of OpenAppStack, join our Matrix channel: #openappstack:systemli.org.