[horde] Horde project status

[Louis-Philippe Allard]

  Quoting lameventanas at gmail.com:

> Hi everyone,
>
> I wonder if anyone else has thought about the Horde project status,  
> as there are a few things that make me worry:
>
> 1. Horde still doesn't work with PHP 8, despite the fact that it was  
> released more than 2 years ago, and PHP 7.x is not even getting  
> security fixes anymore. Soon enough there won't even be packages  
> available from any Linux distributions.
> Any day now a PHP vulnerability will be announced that will force  
> everyone to upgrade to 8.x and replace Horde with something else.
>
> 2. The community seems to has dwindled, I think the target audience  
> of Horde has moved to Nextcloud. The reasons for this would make for  
> an interesting discussion, but mailing lists are an awful channel  
> for this, it's not the 2000's anymore. An official Reddit channel  
> would go a long way in community building.
>
> 3. The number of developers and in general people working on the  
> project seems very small and spread thin.
>
> Some suggestions for the people in charge of the project:
>
> 1. Make the necessary changes ASAP so that this thing works with PHP  
> 8, even if some functionality has to be sacrificed for a while.
>
> 2. Create a Reddit channel to improve communication and community  
> building. A bigger community should bring more contributors.
>
> 3. Horde is an LLC, so a commercial company, right? Then it's  
> possible to increase the workforce by hiring more employees.
>
> Don't get me wrong, this is not pointless criticism. I think this is  
> an amazing project. I would just hate to see so much hard work go to  
> waste.
> --
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I meant to send this kind of email for more than a year now for  
various reasons but refrained because I didnt want to frustrate any  
hard working devs (and they seem to be rare nowadays), but generally,  
I also feel the exact same way.  I've been using Horde since around  
2009-2010 and I can tell back then, the level of activity on the  
project was 10x what it is now.  One can simply look at the maillist  
archives and compare.  

For the way the users and devs communicates, in my opinion the  
maillist is fine, I hate Reddit (for multiple reasons).

Sooner or later I believe the Horde project will find itself at a  
cross road due to security reasons (at the minimum) or not keeping up  
with the competition.   I think this project is too big and too much  
effort was put into it to just slowly go obsolete...
  Louis-Philippe Allard
lp.allard.1 at gmail.com
Sent using Horde Groupware on GNU/Linux