Sustainable Funding for EasyEngine - From "side project" to Real Project

I think they already working on v4 and Launching new version every single month doesn’t make much sense

Yes, they have been working on it for the last two years or so…:slight_smile:

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Then must be something big coming why crying about the update then

I am absolutely not in the mood for debating but please watch your language and take some time before offending. I am not crying for updates.

There are plenty of ways to maintain and update easy engine on my own. I just would not want to fund anything that unfortunately is not moving forward and has been stuck in hiatus for years.

Besides that this is an open-discussion thread and my opinion is not a final statement of any sort.

im not getting offended you simply sound like this project is dead nothing more than that

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@vibhi Please stay out of this topic as your kind of language and abusive writing is not ok! I have flagged your post as inappropriate.

@mrmad Thanks for your input! I am not thinking about any fundraising but a way to let them work more on it so that exactly those few updates can happen more often.

@rahul286 Please share your input with us.

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I feel the same way. A donation model with some people contributing via code. I would be willing to contribute to EE as while I am familiar with code I don’t have the time and skill to contribute. Such a model would have seen EE getting much more updates. No offence to the Dev team but the move to V4 has been slow by comparative past standards. Updates used to be more frequent and now it seems everything has stalled and the project is beginning to feel like its not a priority. I would encourage someone who knows Python to fork the current release instead of the PHP release.

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@Garikai_Dzoma Thank you also for your valuable input!

I don’t have time to dig old links now… but my (achy breaky) memory tells me that V4 was going to be some sort of freemium model. The paid/subscription version was to have features like a web-based panel to administer your EE instance, backup management, staging environment, etc, while the basic offering continued to be free.

But then, for some reason, development stopped/slowed. However you want to phrase it, v4 development was announced way back on Oct 6, 2016. We’re in May 2018 – nearly 2 years later – and we don’t even have an ETA.

v3.7.4 was released on Aug 29, 2016 and the next point release v3.7.5 was published on Mar 30, 2018 – nearly 1.5 years later. While I’m not saying a server software should necessarily have a rapid release cycle. What’s important here is that this is a total deviation from the release cycle EE users were used to.

Add to this, the sporadic (at best) communication from the team, and it should be no wonder people are considering the product dead and asking for alternatives.

I’m not a developer, and I’ve no idea of the issues at hand here. I’m just an end user who loves EE’s simplicity and elegance, and willing to pay for a well-supported product with a clear vision and development milestone.

But right now it’s clear EE development is not a priority for rtcamp. Not saying they’re not working on it – it just doesn’t seem to be getting a whole lot of TLC to move the product forward quickly. Heck, they can’t even commit to an ETA because it’ll put a whole lot of pressure on the team:

v4 ETA

I do not have any ETA for v4 this time. It may happen next month, next year or I might give up on the project someday (unlikely).

Last time announcing an ETA created a lot of pressure on me and my team. So I am avoiding committing to a date for something we still consider a side project at rtCamp.

The only promise I can make is that if we abandon EasyEngine, I will be the first to let you know. Sorry but I do not like to sugar coat reality.

So walk along at your own risk!

That’s the reality, straight from the horses own mouth.

And how well does that score on the vote of confidence scale?

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EE is great. I read that they place their resources in the “money aking side”.

I love EE. However, I have been playing with the idea on installing trellis & bedrock.

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@GeorgeAppiah Thank you very much! I agree!

We should try to convince them to make it a real project instead of a side project and that is also the reason for this thread.

The freemium model sounds good @rahul286, (thanks for the info @GeorgeAppiah) why not test the waters of how many people would be willing to pay some money on a monthly basis. Like I said in the other thread about alternatives: There are no alternatives I can see replacing EE because they all lack in some way. (Correct me if I’m wrong but full page redis cache is kind of an EE innovation?!)

Unfortunately @rahul286 has not communicated with us in a longer period now. Please do.

Also thank you @madbradjohnson for your short and to the point input which reflects the opinion of many others. (I have a VPS that I split into LXD/LXC Containers because I cannot do another layer of virtualization so roots/trellis is out for me, also correct me if I’m wrong about the virtualization with Vagrant).

Please all like my first post if you are willing to pay a monthly something to make the project a real project instead of a side one. And convince others if you can. Thanks!

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Have you opened up a line of communication with the people heading up EE?

@madbradjohnson I thought this is the line of communication. :smiley:

Nope… How about a direct email. Or a phone call? I am not even sure if they monitor the forums???

I thought I saw some comments from them here. But I will let them know about this topic via email. Thanks for the suggestion.

There is no need for more communication, EasyEngine development is done on Github, and if you want to follow progress of the next release, you just have to enable “Watching” on EasyEngine repository. If you take a look on the pull requests list, you will see you are wrong about “EE development is not a priority for rtcamp”. There is already a EE v4 release branch with a lot of informations about v4 commands and configuration. And the docker.hub EasyEngine page is the proof, we should not have to wait too much before the official release.

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@all please do not forget to like my first post in this topic if you like the idea of giving EasyEngine some more support.

Sorry for a delayed reply. I have a long list of “dramatic” reasons but I have very less time so will keep my reply to the point.

Re: Donations

I am afraid to say, donations are not a sustainable model.

We already have a donation page. I am grateful to all the people who donated.

But in reality, its impossible to depend on donations. Atleast for a small project like EasyEngine.

Re: Premium stuff

We no longer offer premium support. We tried that. But once people paid some bucks, they wanted too much of time and reported many issues that are not related to EasyEngine or in some cases not at all related to the server.

We do have a plan to release a web-version someday (freemium model). But it needs a sizeable investment which we don’t have.

For CLI v4 release, we have some funds for development. Also, as we are developing in PHP, we can use spare dev bandwidth from rtCamp - the parent company behind EasyEngine.

Bottleneck

The main bottleneck is me! :disappointed:

It has been always the case that I do research + testing and then write articles which EE dev team followed.

The overall EasyEngine idea/design, all caching including redis-full page cache, nginx-helper plugin, and our nginx-builds are my brainchild.

I couldn’t give any time to do any research for LetsEncrypt in EasyEngine v3 and that feature amounts to almost 20% of issues and support requests we receive!

I don’t want to let it happen again, hence the project is moving slowly.

As rtCamp is growing, I am unable to give plenty of time to EasyEngine. I recently started putting questions that need research on github issue tracker. If you can contribute to research side, please do!

Alternatives & forks

I have made it clear many times that we have no problem with people forking EE or using alternatives.

EE is MIT licensed. So basically anyone can do what they want with EE!

Priority

EE is a side project to me. It may become our key product someday or die a slow death. In case of later, I will let you know when to switch!

We will keep running this site and portal, as long as we ourself use EE. The day we stop using EE, we will put a goodbye message on the main website!

Summary

  1. The best way to help the project, help us with your knowledge and expertise especially around containers. You can start getting involved with research issues.
  2. If you want to use EE, please use it. If you want to abandon EE, please do so. I am grateful in both cases for giving EE a chance.
  3. If you are very serious about EasyEngine and would like to join the project as an investor or product lead/manager, please write to me. :wink:
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For anyone following this, v4 beta1 was recently released: https://easyengine.io/blog/ee-v4-beta-1-release/