Goodbye phpGroupWare

I am writing this post with a strong sense of sadness. At the same time I feel that I have no other option. I am walking away from phpGroupWare.

Before I walk out the door, lets go for a trip down memory lane. Insert tacky music wavy lines down the screen and bad hair styles from here on in.

I think the first time I heard Linux mentioned was in 1996/97. In 1999 I had my first experience with Linux, through an anarchist friend, I was very curious, but didn’t have much of an opportunity to play with it.

In 2000, over a few months I started to play with Linux and GNOME dual booting my machine. I could never really make it do what I wanted, but I persisted. The first version of Linux I bought was Macmillan Linux 6.5 - I still have it in a cupboard somewhere. I then moved on to Red Hat 6.2.

In 2001 Julie’s work was sick of waiting for their shared calendar solution. I was contracted to install it. They had an NT4 box running Lotus Notes, which no one wanted to touch - including me. I found phpGW by searching (probably “yahooing”) for “open source groupwise”. I would later discover I had embarked on an epic journey. I knew of open source, but I didn’t know a lot about it. PHP seemed pretty cool, as did phpGroupWare. I recommend they get a new server - a good one, dual PIII-800s, RAID-1 and Linux, it cost over $3000. I learnt a lot on that box including basic Linux sysadmin, compiling stuff from source and what happens when you forget to update lilo. Today that server lies idle in a cupboard in my office.

Very quickly I became involved in the phpGroupWare community. By 2002 I considered myself active and later that year I was promoted to release manager. By 2003 I had landed my first overseas gig indirectly through phpGroupware. By now I felt very strongly that I was a free software developer. 2004 saw the EGroupware.Org fork, or as I still like to refer to it, the EGO fork. This did considerable damage to the project and sucked a lot of life out of it.

Since then the project has done some cool things, but struggled to get a release of trunk for over 5 years. There are some really smart people around the project, but none of us seem focused to shipping a product, and I think we all have different ideas of what that product should be. I have met many awesome people over the years, include the Paris conference in 2006.

It is now late 2009, I have 2 kids and a growing business. PHP 5.3 is out and we are still trying to port to PHP5. There are many solid application frameworks around - my personal favourites are Zend and Drupal. Both of these projects have large developer bases, active communities, clear development processes and documentation, phpGroupWare fails on each count.

The project has exposed me to so many great people and ideas. These things will stay with me for the rest of my life.

If anyone is to take over phpGroupWare, my first suggestion would be to start over. Clearly define a purpose for the project, define a target market, build a product which fits that purpose and appeals to that market. Such an approach will involve a significant investment of resrources. I just can’t commit any resources to the project at this time. If things change I may come back one day, but now things feel too far gone.

As much as I hate to say this, I think phpGroupWare is a dead project. I feel that it is time for me to move on. I will make myself available to assist with any handover or shut down of the project.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to making phpGroupWare such a great project over the years. It was fun while it lasted.