Future of Forge + Roadmap

[metersk]

Quite interested in making use of this project/libraries. Curious if you have a roadmap available/where you see this project going in the future/contingency plan for potential EOL.

My main concern is getting hooked into an ecosystem where support channels/updates are no longer available. Obviously, a very common concern for many when using new projects (especially when paying), but curious to here your thoughts.

Thanks!

[davegaeddert]

Hey @metersk, good question. I don't have any concrete roadmap that's available. Not sure how much of the Forge "history" you've followed in the last year, but the more recent thinking has been to explicitly separate Forge into individual Django apps that can be used independently (or together) on any Django project. My hope is that this makes "buying into Forge" less of a thing, and instead just feels like a cohesive set of Django libraries from one source.

For the most part, I would think of the forge-{x} packages like any other django-{x} packages — there are no guarantees that they'll continue to be supported or even available on PyPI! But, like most Python libraries, the odds are pretty slim that anything is going to disappear overnight. Hopefully the fact that I'm trying to put a little more polish and formalization (and revenue!) around Forge also gives people a little more confidence that I have more invested in this than a random one-off project.

For Forge Pro specifically, if I were to shut that down for any reason, I think the suggestion would be for people to "vendor" the private packages and continue to use them as a part of their own codebase. That's the same thing that I suggest if you decide to buy Forge Pro but then cancel and stop receiving package updates — you can vendor the last version you had access to. In that sense, I think you can consider Forge Pro to be code that I wrote so you didn't have to — you can continue using it no matter what, the only real risk is that you might have to pick up the maintenance yourself in the future if you can't get updates for whatever reason? Honestly, if I decided to shut down Forge Pro then I would probably just open source those private packages anyway and people could do whatever they like with them. No matter what, the reason I wanted to put revenue behind Forge is so these things have to be considered more seriously.

Does that help? Let me know what you think — it's a question that's been on my mind too from the other side.

[metersk]

Yes, this is very helpful, thanks!