Dear Friends, Community Members, and Colleagues,
Today, I am writing to all of you to announce the launch of both a Community Edition (CE) and a subscription-based, Enterprise Support Edition (ESE) for HDF5. This model is similar to Red Hat, Lustre, and other open source projects. We are moving down this pathway to address the challenges that continuously face us in achieving sustainability and increasing community involvement.
Since I joined The HDF Group in April 2016, I made it my mission as the CEO to pursue a strategy that not only enables us to survive but thrive as an organization. I truly believe this new model will take us into the future and keep HDF technologies relevant for another 30 years.
As this is a major announcement and change to the community, I want to personally explain why we’re doing this and how this might impact your use of HDF5:
- We plan to release CE and ESE during the summer of 2018.
- Core features of CE and ESE are identical. We are NOT taking anything away.
- Maintenance (i.e. bug fixes and security patches from The HDF Group) is deployed to ESE first.
- All work from ESE will be released to CE periodically.
- Add-on modules that provide additional functionality outside the core library will only be available to ESE subscribers.
- We will setup a Technical Advisory Committee to influence the future directions of HDF5 CE development.
We believe this new approach will ensure stable code while stimulating community-driven innovation and direct participation. The ESE subscriptions will provide The HDF Group the sustained funding that will allow us to better support our mission and the community that depends on HDF technologies every day.
You can learn more about Community Edition and Enterprise Support Edition on our website. We welcome you to join the conversation here, on our forum. Over the coming weeks, we will be sharing more details of the coming launch to make sure we involve our community each step of the way.
Sincerely,
David Pearah, CEO
The HDF Group