New Maintenance Policy

Posted on February 5, 2013 by Optimus Prime

Starting with PrimeFaces 3.5, a new maintenance policy for PrimeFaces has been initiated. This new policy is basically a new feature offered to our PrimeFaces PRO service.

Until now, we have been doing maintenance(bugfix only) releases such as 3.3.1, 3.4.1, 3.4.2 periodically followed by a major release e.g. 3.4, 3.5. From now on, tags/sources of these certified-official releases will be available to PrimeFaces PRO users exclusively. Although there will be a private branch, each improvement-fix made into maintenance branches will also be committed to public repository targeting trunk which is the next major release. As code is open, community members can access the fixes at trunk and maintain their own branches locally if necessary. PrimeFaces PRO users on the other hand will receive certified maintenance releases in binary and source format.

For example, 3.5 is out and we’ll create a private branch for 3.5.1. New features will go in public trunk only (3.6-SNAPSHOT), bug fixes on the other hand will be committed to private 3.5.1 branch and the public trunk so everyone has access to the fixes. PrimeFaces PRO users will receive certified maintenance releases periodically and Community users need to maintain their own maintenance branches or keep using the development builds of trunk although latter has the risk of instability.

So by becoming a PrimeFaces PRO user, you don’t need to maintain maintenance branches yourself, dig the trunk code to find the fixes to merge and avoid the risk of using a development build of trunk in production.

We are fully committed to open source, PrimeFaces is licensed under apache license since it was born 4 years ago and all subprojects of PrimeFaces are also open source. This maintenance policy does not hide a single line of code from public access since any feature, enhanement and bug fix is also available in public repository.

We are sure that PrimeFaces community will support this policy because more PRO users mean improved financial backing for PrimeFaces resulting in more investment regarding team size, more features, less bugs, better quality and all of these under Open Source Philosophy which we truly believe in!

Update: Thanks to the great feedback from the community, there is now an affordable way to get binaries-sources of maintenance releases without becoming a PrimeFaces PRO user.

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45 thoughts on “New Maintenance Policy”

  1. Short summary. No maintenance for free. Only major public releases. You have to pay to get maintenance and bug fixes.

    • You don’t have to pay to get bug fixes, each fix will be committed to public trunk and private maintenance branch.

      • What is meant by PRIVATE maintenance branch? Is it available only to PRO users? or it will be available to community to build jars during maintenance releases?

    • As I understand it you technically pay for the buildingprocess and a downloadlink/jar.
      That is nothing particularly new though.
      A well-known application server did not release the latest version as binary either, but the source is all there, ready for everyone to build.

      I will kind of miss the comfort, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

      @Cagatay
      Will there be an announcement when the maintenance release is published? Or do we freeloader get any other kind of notification when to start our own build?

      Best wishes,
      Ragnar

  2. So fixes and improvements will be available to the Primefaces PRO users directly through maintainance releases and those same fixes and improvements will be available to the community members after major releases only!!!

    • In binary as a certified release yes. Same fixes will go in trunk as well so you have the chance to fork your own maintenance release or use the development trunk itself since it has the fixes <- This is a bit risky though since trunk is not for production use.

  4. +1 I’m okay with this. I can be patient and wait for the certified and maintenance releases. PrimeFaces 3.5 meets all my needs/requirements for now! Happy Camper here!

  6. What about critical vulnerabilities fixes? Non PRO users won’t get those until next Major Release as well?

    • Critical, Trivial, it doesn’t matter really since any type of fix will also be committed to public trunk as well to be accessible by everyone.

        • Lives of non PRO users will become a little bit harder? no way! primefaces 3.5 is an excellent release. use it until 3.6 becomes available! don’t worry, be happy! (as the song says)

  7. Will this mean that more resources will be allocated to the maintenance releases? So far PF has evolved with amazing speed. For business use (the only ones that will pay I suppose) however, stability is what most people would want to pay for, me included. Also +1 on being public about pricing.

    Cheers,
    Patrik

  8. Sorry here my post for all english speaking people:
    It’s hard to get a High quality Build Version Out of svn. Git would be easier. Better than sell bugfixing would be to sell Services and Enterprise Features. It should be Open Source Even for bugfixes and Easy jar Download.
    It’s a pitty for this Good Framework to go this way. Same was with the documentation some month ago which you could only buy.

    • I’m curious as to what you mean by “It’s hard to get a High quality Build Version Out of svn. Git would be easier. “

    • I don’t mind buying the “better” documentation and books, we have to support them somehow.

      I strongly agree they should move the project to github or a similar platform to engage more users. I for one would like to contribute back.

  9. I’m ok to build myself Maintenance Release, (like Jboss AS 7.1.3 for example) but I have a question :
    In public trunk repo, there is new features + bug fixes/Improvement mixed
    So for community it very very hard (or impossible) to distinguish bug fixes vs new features and to compile our self a maintenance release…
    For JBoss AS there is a particular tag to be sure to have the right source to compile…

  10. It would be great if price is listed publicly to access the maintenance release jar files.

  11. Just get the branch’s source and build it yourself, I can’t see any problems with this, just the “official support”, however, there are bugs in the maintenance releases anyway. If you want “official support” pay for it, if not, enjoy the open source policy and deal with it.

  12. This seems like a strange artificial restriction to put on general users, and it will just cause devs to need to spend more time dealing with PF while hurting their user experience with an otherwise fantastic product. If you go this route, I wish you would offer a more reasonably priced PRO subscription for single devs like myself that work for non-profit organizations. I would be willing to pay out of pocket (since I have no budget), I understand your time is valuable, but last time I checked, the pricing was WAY out of my range. The other issue I see is that it will be more difficult to reference a bug in a specific version because so many people will be building from various points in the repo. Just my two cents.

  14. I know you guys must make money, but I don’t think this is the right way to go. I’m all for new components going private for a while, complex ones being paid, or something like that, however, holding out on updates is a disservice to the community.

    If you must do this, try to at least ease the pain. Provide a decent public repository (git, hg, or whatever, svn is a joke), document where stable patches go, so that we can build and test it ourselves, and possibly, give back to primefaces, with fixes and beta testing.

    I think I might be moving my boat elsewhere and not look at 3.6 at all, and instead, look for a new migration path.. pain….ful.

    • PrimeFaces keeps getting better! i’m sure you will be back, Daniel. PrimeFaces Mobile is next on the list. I’m sure you will be peeking around the corner and at showcase/etc.

      trust me, i love using SNAPSHOT ‘always’, but because of this new maintenance policy, i don’t have to use SNAPSHOT, and my input related to SNAPSHOT and bugs will not posted here, because i’m not going to worry about trying to piece together trunk/svn.

      i can and will be content using PrimeFaces 3.5 (final).

  15. I really understand that you have to make money with the Primefaces product. Letting users pay for new components / consultancy / 24h response time etc is a great business model. However, I don’t feel comfortable with not releasing bug-fixes. Let’s be honest. It is almost impossible to work with a stable version by manually checking svn and merge the code ourselves.

    For every developer/user stability is crucial and bug fixes are part of that. I also don’t have a problem with paying for this service but the pricing of Primefaces PRO is too high for many small start-up companies. Isn’t it possible to introduce some kind of “Primefaces PRO light” subscription where we can have access to the releases but without the consultancy / 24h response time / private questions / the newest components etc.?

    I hope that bugs reported by the community are still important and fixes will be made available at an affordable price.

    One more thing: Primefaces rocks and you are lightyears ahead of the competition. Keep up the good work!

  16. Will we be informed as to what revision number the cut off is per maintenance release? or is that irrelevant if PF workflow and submissions are non linear per release (that is PF certified maint releases includes certain revisions and omits others up to a certain pt)

    • good luck! report back here with the joy you had/have with another ‘faces’ open source. :)

  19. It’s interesting that I have not heard any comments here from the members that are labeled as ‘expert member’ in the community forums. :)

  20. Maybe every major PF release should have 2 versions. Paid (10$-30$ or more) with access to bug fixes, and free with model corresponding to maintenance policy?
    I know I should pay You for your great job what I do with pleasure (buying PF documentation for example) but my budget will not bear being PRO user.

  21. I try to describe what it is in money, because the thing seems to be related to money:

    In my opinion one person could do the work to merge the bug fixes to a new brunch and make this brunch public accessible again. Unfortunately this work is already done by PrimeFaces.

    So I think, we need around 1.000 people (the more the better) with a 10 bugs monthly subscription and if this virtual employed person would be employed by PrimeFaces, the money would be at free disposal.

    I really really! honor the work of PrimeFaces team, but it is just stupid for us PrimeFaces users to do that work thousandfold again and again, everyone for his own and we cannot become all PRO users.

    Dear Cagatay, please offer an affordable subscription to your maintenance releases, just sell them for 10 bugs or so and don’t let us do that merge thousandfold.

  22. This is sad news. PrimeFaces is a very nice product, but I already found that the focus was much more on fancy new features than on the fixing of existing, sometimes major bugs in important components. I don’t care for the latest new widget, I care about bugs in DataTable and the like, those are what keep me from delivering value to customers.

    I understand that PrimeFaces needs to generate revenue. I wouldn’t mind paying for it either, it is a professional tool that I use daily. But last time I checked, PRO membership was way out of our league. I also don’t need PRO level support. I need access to maintenance releases. And no, building my own version from a development trunk is not a viable option for me. Even the maintenance releases regularly break things here, I’m not willing to gamble on daily builds.

    Please find a more reasonable (and public) subscription pricing scheme. If not, I will look for alternatives for future projects.

  24. Can Primefaces become none-open source one day? I am wondering if there is any regulation about open source says that: once a software becomes open source, can it become none-open-source later somehow? This decision can be made only by its owner at any time? Just curious.