Kirby on the long term

[1n3JgKl9pQ6cUMrW]

What is the future of Kirby when Bastian (the creator and genius!) decides to stop with it?

I mean… he falls in love… with a human being! Decides to quit the project.

Will it stop? Will someone else be able to continue his excellent work?

Will it be opensource?

The reason I ask this, is for long-term support of the cms;

No body wants a cms that depends on the brains of one genius developer;

When a Wordpress-developer quits… Wordpress itself will still be continued.

But what can I say to my clients, when they ask for “the future” of Kirby, it’s long-term support… will it still be updated in, let’s say, 3 years or so?

Ps. Keep up the excellent work… for at least 3 years of so

[jenstornell]

Maybe only @bastianallgeier can answer that question so I tagged him in so he will se this post. But yes, I also would like to know that. But I hope he will continue forever…

[1n3JgKl9pQ6cUMrW]

Cool!

I hope Bastian is the first person on Earth with eternal live

But I am seriously migrating my sites from Wordpress to Kirby… which can be tricky once Bastian decides to move on to another project / live / hobby / job / etc…

Then we are all stuck with a cms that’s not updated on the long term.

Please, don’t get me wrong - I am NOT negative or something like that; I am - open minded - questioning myself “what will happen when one person decides to stop developing this awesome cms”.

[texnixe]

Your question is fair enough. However, even with a crystal ball @bastianallgeier can’t tell a future that is out of his control.

So the question is rather, is there somebody out there who would take over in case something ever happens, or can you teach yourself enough in the meantime to be able to update the base if ever necessary.

[lukasbestle]

First of all, Kirby will definitely be open source, because it is that right now as well. We will never just take it down and go after people who want to use the code. That just doesn’t make sense.

The Kirby team consists of 4,5 people at the moment, so I think that there will be someone that is able to maintain Kirby.

But as stated previously, the future is the future. Every product becomes irrelevant on the market at some point, be it a month, a year, a decade or a century. Let’s hope that Kirby will stay relevant for the next 1337 years, but we just don’t know.
Same for maintaining it. No one can guarantee continued development, not even the WordPress team. At some point, WordPress will probably split up, be forked and then someone will create a new product out of it.

We don’t even know if PHP will still be maintained in 10 years.

[1n3JgKl9pQ6cUMrW]

Well, my question is;

Imagine that Bastian decides to fall in love with another project of human-being … are “we” (or “someone”) allowed to continue his excellent work?

Is Kirby CMS open-source, or is it his property?

I know there are some forks of it already, but I do not know if these are “legal” …

[bastianallgeier]

Good question and some great answers so far

Those who know me, know that I am a fan of long-term thinking. My previous adventure — Zootool — has been running for almost 7 years and I fought hard to keep it going even through a pretty tough financial crisis. 7 years is not really long-term in the “real world”, but for the web it is kind of an achievement, if you consider the current life-span of most online services.

Kirby’s business model is a direct result of the financial struggles with Zootool and the idea to keep something up and running even longer than that. We are in Kirby’s 5th year now and it’s going strong. More and more agencies, companies and freelancers trust Kirby and constantly buy new licenses. Kirby is far away from hockey-stick growth, but it has been growing noticably every year so far. This made it possible to invest more and more of my time and money into the work of Lukas, Sonja and Nico. In fact I plan to extend this even more this year.

I think we are well beyond the point of being just another hyped CMS and Kirby is taking an important place in many user’s toolbelts. I’m very much aware of the responsibility that comes with this fact. But it also means financial security to a certain extend for Kirby and for us.

It also means that my personal motivation is heavily growing with Kirby’s success and I hope I can keep the rest of the team motivated as well.

My dream is to keep it growing like this, get the team even more involved, hire more people, grow the community and make Kirby better and better with every release and still innovate with it in 5 or even 10 years from now.

So far, the project has been a dream in all terms. In 2012, I would have never expected it to become, what it is today.

On a personal level, I’m all-in on long-term thinking as well. I have a family, a wonderful wife and son and we are currently building a house. So we are planning ahead 20-30 years there as well. I’m old fashioned, when it comes to such stuff

But as you all said, you can never tell the future. If something should happen to me, or Kirby sales suddenly collapse, we might be forced to leave this plan behind and find a different future for Kirby. I really hope not! But I said right from the beginning of Kirby, that the trust-based, open-source model is the best guarantee I can give the community, that the project will live on, even if something like this would happen. The flexibility, which is core to Kirby’s philosophy, should also be reflected here.

I hope this works as a good enough answer, to keep on trusting in Kirby as a reliable project for the coming years.

[1n3JgKl9pQ6cUMrW]

Amazing reply - thank you… SIR!

[NECKRHINOS]

[fvsch]

Some of the language in this thread suggests that Kirby CMS is open-source. While I have zero problem with Kirby’s current licensing, for the sake of clarity I’d like to stress that Kirby is not open-source in the usual sense and does not comply (or try to comply) with the Open Source Definition (from the Open Source Initiative):

Open source doesn’t just mean access to the source code.

I don’t mean to create or revive a debate around Kirby licensing. Just trying to clarify the use of “open source” here. See Try | Kirby CMS for official info.

And to perhaps help with this kind of clarification, I opened an issue for adding a LICENSE file to the Kirby repo: [Cms] Implement custom Exceptions in Kirby\Form · Issue #410 · getkirby/kirby · GitHub

[1n3JgKl9pQ6cUMrW]

Maybe you’re right.

I think Bastian becomes very mad when someone forks his code and asked money for it.

It is his intellectual property - and he is the ‘owner’ of it, or am I wrong?

(sorry for the English…)

[texnixe]

The Kirby license can be found here: https://getkirby.com/license; unfortunately, the link in the kirby/panel readme’s is not correct.