Li Hi All - As we wrap up 2024, I want to highlight some key wins, important initiatives, and reiterate our vision of a world where financial services are ubiquitously offered for everyone via commercial open source business models.
Our hosting foundation, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), is a vibrant community of over 200 top level projects. These include many of the core internet and web projects that drive innovation and scale in a world increasingly driven by open source & cloud technology. We continue to rely on the ASF for important infrastructure and standards of release and CVE /security issue management. Today, our software is in use in organizations large and small around the world, reaching - according to some vendors - at least 65 million end users, and by dozens of vendors and maybe hundreds of direct providers. I suspect this under counts our use, given the large number of downloads we see. It also doesn't see all of our impact. Even where we are not chosen as the platform, our value proposition ensures an honest assessment of options in the market. And, our developer and user community continues to grow. Some highlights and things to do: In 2024, we reworked the docker hub target and got that working again. We continue to see a lot of downloads there. This builds directly from GitHub on the tip of development. We released 1.9.0 in January 2024, and version 1.10.1 on Dec 31st, 2024. In 2025, we intend to make the release process easier such that this can happen more frequently. As part of this we may decide (after discussion) to do away with back porting of security patches and only have one official current release. If you want to earn karma by back porting recent security fixes or have an issue to report, send to security @ Fineract .apache.org In 2025, I'd also like to propose the following: * Readme and asciidoc documentation is improved and versioned with each release, with wiki content streamlined to project management. * Builds improvements as discussed in this dev thread https://lists.apache.org/thread/9l46b7p6bxt7c475o94wrg3k2wc54zdv * Progress on each of the FSIPs as outlined at https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/FINERACT/Fineract+Significant+Improvement+Proposals In a virtuous cycle of innovation, we continue to need the "roadmap" of items like those on the FSIPs as well as a set of "anti-roadmap" items, aka much later priority roadmap items. The roadmap is defined by the community not by any one Vendor, but contributions drive that roadmap. We have to ask “what is being planned?” Or “what would you like to add?” And discuss. Our assumed anti-roadmap currently includes "we will not embed complex reporting" and "we will not build the front end", as it is useful in defining where outside users and vendors can develop additional value-adds with some predictability. The philosophy of commercial open source requires companies ("vendors") making money such that they can contribute to the core code, and always exist upstream on the codebase because it is strategic for them. "You get what you develop, you get what they develop, you get what everyone develops." In terms of patterns, as has been pointed out recently, we need to push back on "Endless feature expansion". We don't do a good job of pruning features, which makes the process of development more complex than it needs to be. We may need a more frank discussion in 2025 about backwards compatibility and feature limitations. +1 on "look left and right" when touching the code. We should make sure that we develop cleanly and with sufficient documentation and consistency. More eyeballs are needed on the reviews. Subscribe to the feed and start following. In 2025, we should clear out old jira tickets and focus on the real needs and errors of today. Is this something you can help with? We continue to see traffic on slack channels at Mifos and at the Apache Fineract slack channels. https://the-asf.slack.com/archives/C4QPZURQQ In any case, outside Vendor conversations are welcomed, although the Apache Fineract listserv remains our official record of the project. As 2024 wraps up, thank you for all you have done to make the Fineract project a community. Happy New Year from Seattle James Dailey Project Management Committee Chair
