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Znuny Professional Services

The ((OTRS)) Community Edition Fork with long-term Support (LTS)

Why we forked

In April 2018 OTRS AG announced (LINK 1) a change to the release strategy for the product OTRS, for which Znuny GmbH predominantly offers services.

The previously publicly-available product OTRS, consisting of OTRS and the OTRS Business Solution, was rebranded and renamed “OTRS” and “((OTRS)) Community Edition”, respectively.

The branch that formerly operated as “Business Edition” would move forward as “OTRS”. This change took place with the release of OTRS 7 on November 18, 2018.

Initial Situation

In April 2018 OTRS AG announced (LINK 1) a change to the release strategy for the product OTRS, for which Znuny GmbH predominantly offers services.

The previously publicly-available product OTRS, consisting of OTRS and the OTRS Business Solution, was rebranded and renamed “OTRS” and “((OTRS)) Community Edition”, respectively.

The branch that formerly operated as “Business Edition” would move forward as “OTRS”. This change took place with the release of OTRS 7 on November 18, 2018.

The vendor announced that it would first make new functions available to its own paying contract customers and incorporate them into the open source version “((OTRS)) Community Edition” with a delay of approximately two years (see LINK 2 and LINK 3-Page 6). The Community Edition would initially receive only minor updates and later only security updates.

The above notices are the vendor’s original announcements.

The Change

On December 23, 2020, a message was published via the vendor’s news feed, which informed customers that support for the ((OTRS)) Community Edition, including security fixes, would be discontinued on January 1, 2021, without announcing a release for a newer version, ((OTRS)) Community Edition 7.

This message surprised us for several reasons:

  • The announcement, that functions and releases will be made available for the Community Edition after approximately two years, contradicts former behavior and statements
  • There was no advance communication or warning
  • An eight day deadline, over the holidays and at the end of the year, is extremely unsportsmanlike and far from a professional collaboration

The assumption is that, in the absence of an updated version of the Community Edition, customers would be forced into using the commercial product.

The Future

In order to mitigate the situation for Community Edition users, and of course for our customers, we have decided to take over the support of security releases for the next two years.

We have the resources, the experience and the infrastructure to accomplish this. We have been operating the OTRS community forum for years and have a large number of customers who trust our work.

Due to the license (GPL), access to the code is easily possible, however, for copyright reasons we cannot continue to use the name of OTRS or ((OTRS)) Community Edition in the service releases. The long-term support version (LTS) will be found at https://github.com/znuny/znuny.

Via this version, we will deliver security fixes and maintenance updates, which will ensure continued operation.

The software in its current form will remain compatible with previous versions and with a version 7 of the Community Edition, if released.

We heartily invite the community to support and provide us with pull requests and bug fixes.

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