Hi Gabriel,
Thank you for the feedback. My name is Jason Gilmore and I’m DreamFactory’s CTO. I can assure you the platform is not dead. In fact the reality is quite the contrary, and we’ve been very busy expanding our staff due to the incredible number of new customers we’ve brought on board this year. To enumerate just a few items we’ve been working on in recent months:
- New onsite and remote training services. Learn more at https://dreamfactory.com/training. This has already been a huge benefit to both OSS and commercial users of our software, and we’re happy to tailor a specific training agenda to suit your team’s needs.
- Expanded consulting and custom development services. We work with DreamFactory customers around the world helping them to architect and develop their DreamFactory platform-powered projects. We don’t yet have a website page for this because our customers are contacting us directly, and invite you to do the same at sales AT dreamfactory.com.
- Wildly improved documentation. We’ve only very recently launched our new guide, which you can find at https://guide.dreamfactory.com/. We’ll soon be open sourcing this guide on GitHub so all interested users can contribute.
- Automated installers!!! We are in the final phases of testing automated installers for Ubuntu, Debian, and other Linux flavors. These are so incredibly useful and convenient, and we’re very excited to make them available to all users.
Perhaps most notably, we’re excited to announce we’ve been hard at work on a hosted SaaS solution, which we’ll be releasing in Q1 2019! If you’d like to be contacted when the beta is available, please add your information to https://www.dreamfactory.com/saas-beta. We decided to take on this initiative because an incredible number of OSS and paid customers alike have voiced interest in making their DreamFactory experience even more convenient by leaving the administration to us!
As far as the bugs you reference, like all software, DreamFactory logically suffers from bugs, and we regularly patch reported bugs for our paying customers. Those patches are subsequently incorporated into releases, and logically some are incorporated into our private repositories while others are incorporated into our public repositories. In fact next week we’ll be releasing 2.14.2, which merges 3 bugs previously reported by customers which have since undergone thorough testing.
As far as the roadmap is concerned, like many OSS-based companies we work hard to balance the free software we make available to everyone, and ensuring we’re able to earn enough revenue to keep the lights on. Accordingly, our priorities can and do change to suit these needs, and therefore we’d prefer to err on the side of caution and not publish a roadmap which, like so many others, will almost certainly be incorrect and out of date almost as quickly as it is published. Of course, our paid customers take first priority in determining the scope of this internal roadmap, and I can assure you we have plenty of exciting features to come in 2019 and beyond which will not only be of great use to them, but also to our OSS users.
I invite you to e-mail me anytime with questions and feedback at jason.gilmore AT dreamfactory.com.
Thank you,
Jason