Mayan EDMS author addresses licensing and source code concerns

it is the latest chapter in the saga that started on August 27th, 2012 when Roberto Rosario, the author of the Open Source document management software known as Mayan EDMS, took the two latest unreleased source code branches of the software offline due to claims of license and copyright violations (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/08/28/mayan_edms_gpl_viola...).

In a press release and in an update on the project's website, the author reports that the project and the code were never in any danger off becoming closed permanently: "I will not change the license of Mayan EDMS. I will also continue to work on the software as scheduled. There were never plans for Mayan to go closed source or to stop being released under the GPL.".

One of the most heated discussion center around Roberto's complete control over the project, and this was one of the topics on which he asked the community for further opinions, with an interesting outcome. The opinion of the users is split between two groups, one that wishes him to remain in control and another that wishes the control to pass on to a non for profit organization in the future (https://groups.google.com/d/msg/mayan-edms/YzDpSqeRQ94/HNJrK...).

The end of the communication is perhaps the part that will be of most interest to those following the developments of the story: "And last but not least the branches named ‘hotfix/v0.12.3‘ with updates for the next maintenance version and ‘development‘ containing the latest cutting edge code of the next major version of Mayan EDMS have been made available once again on the official repository on Github for everybody to continue cloning, forking and hacking on it."

So is this a happy ending? It is still too early to tell, but the author does leaves us with something to ponder on that regard too and maybe, just maybe, this is the part that could ultimately restore the community's faith in his leadership and on his ability to move the project past the current dilemma: "Finally, but no less important, I want to thank all the news outlets that reported on this situation for providing the necessary forums for discussion; where there is no discussion there cannot be consensus. And my most sincere thanks to everyone, everywhere in the world, who voiced their opinion, even when not voiced in the best of languages it was still much appreciated. Thank you."

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