New release of Mayan EDMS in time for Xmas.

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Ironically the latest developments of Mayan EDMS have little to do with software development.  A lot of work is going into getting Mayan EDMS the proper commercial backing it needs to continue growing at the rate it has been going.  That being said, growing too fast is also one of the quick ways a product or a company can also extinguish itself, so I’m being very wary of that too.

Documen.to, the commercial side of Mayan EDMS now has two new co-founders to help with the increasing demand for licenses and support contracts and by the way things are going that number is bound to increase soon.

In regards with the branding I’ve team up with GeekLocale to produce the Mayan EDMS logo in physical form for use with the hardware document appliances and anything else that comes up and am very pleased with the results:

Furthermore, I’m supporting the initiative to create a certification for document management the CompTIA Certified Document Imaging Architect (CDIA+) certification:

and took the beta exam as part of that process to help in turn validate the work being put into Mayan EDMS and Documen.to.

And last but not least, today in a few hours will be in the first of a few round of meetings with investors (both non profit and private) who have approached wanting to be a part of Mayan EDMS , Documen.to and their expected growth.

It’s been a great adventure turning a pet project into a full fledged Free Open Source project with commercial backing and I can barely wait to see what tomorrow brings.

The post What’s been happening? appeared first on Mayan EDMS.

Watch the picture, rub you eyes, and watch the picture once more

After setting it up and achieving prompt, the next logical step was getting Mayan EDMS running on this gem.  Thanks to the available port of Debian for the ARM platform and the customized Raspian “Wheezy” distribution for the Raspberry Pi, installing Mayan EDMS was no different than installing in on an every day computer.  The only things that was not available from the Raspian distribution was the OCR engine used by Mayan EDMS, Tesseract.  Although it ran slow, it was possible to get Mayan EDMS up an running with the Raspberry Pi on it’s default hardware configuration.  So after a round of simple tweaks and try outs, overclocking to 900Mhz with a maximum RAM vs. GPU memory configuration, using gunicorn with Nginx and SQLite for data yielded the best setup achieving a rather usable system even more so for such a constrained environment.  Also I’m running Raspian and Mayan EDMS from a class 2, 4GB brandless SD card.  Switching to a higher class card and perhaps with the aid of an USB hard drive (even a SSD) even better results could be achieved.  What’s next, why of course a whole bunch of tiny Raspberry Pies running Mayan EDMSin cluster mode with database replication!  But that one will have to wait, enough distraction for today, and best of all?  Only $35!

Raspberry Pi silently churning out documents via Mayan EDMS

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I will not change the license of Mayan EDMS. I will also continue to work on the software as scheduled. There were never plans for Mayan to go closed source or to stop being released under the GPL. Still, I gave the benefit of the doubt regarding the license choice and the opinion of the community echoes mine. My only concerns were for those that were not following the terms of the GPL license and that were infringing on my copyrights. I was not insinuating any type of adverse action against those complying with the GPL license. I understand your concerns regarding Mayan EDMS, and appreciate the fervor with which you have defended it. Rest assured knowing that Mayan EDMS is and will continue to be released under the GPL.

While I have been available to provide commercial services for Mayan EDMS for a while, that availability was not advertised in Mayan EDMS‘ website as I thought it would be best keep my personal commercial enterprises separated from the Free Open Source parts of the project, instead choosing that space to promote the commercial services of others. Thanks to this process, I have also learned that the majority of users prefer to have the author of the project as their first option when seeking commercial support. The perceived notion that I was not available to provide those services has been named consistently as the primary motivation for the attempts to provide commercial services by individuals and corporation that did not had a complete grasp of the workings of the GPL.

Among the many changes of this reorganization process, Mayan EDMS and myself now have official legal counsels and Mayan EDMS will be become a member of the Free Software Foundation and similar organizations to help users understand and comply with the GPL in a form that works best from the Free and commercial points of view.

To summarize, I am making my availability to provide services and consulting personally through my startup documen.to more visible. Companies or individuals interested in receiving services for Mayan EDMS, know, that in addition of the existing and excellent network of service providers, you may hire me, its author, to install and maintain Mayan EDMS for you. The new legal counsels are hard at work drafting several new licenses to cater for every commercial situation where the GPL may not be the best fit. The website, another critical point raised during these days, has been updated visually and technologically to provide greater communication channels for users to more easily reach me and communicate their concerns. And last but not least the branches named ‘hotfix/v0.12.3‘ with updates for the next maintenance version and ‘development‘ containing the latest cutting edge code of the next major version of Mayan EDMS have been made available once again on the official repository on Github for everybody to continue cloning, forking and hacking on it.

Finally, but no less important, I want to thank all the news outlets that reported on this situation for providing the necessary forums for discussion; where there is no discussion there cannot be consensus. And my most sincere thanks to everyone, everywhere in the world, who voiced their opinion, even when not voiced in the best of languages it was still much appreciated. Thank you.

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The new website design is up an running using WordPress with the free version of the Figero theme (http://www.inkthemes.com/wp-themes/figero-wordpress-theme/). I’ve barely used WordPress before and design is not my area of expertise so tips, tweaks, or suggestions on the look from designers are most welcomed and needed

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People actually care a LOT about Free Open Source software in the DMS space. The complete dominance of this market by commercial products is actually holding back innovation in document management. As in many other aspects of life and technology, users want freedom and want choice, and Mayan EDMS provided both in a market where is very much needed.

Many users will be happy with your choice of license and the terms and conditions of said license, others will want something that allows them to keep their changes, another group just won’t like your license. Again people want freedom and choice, if your don’t give them either one they will get them for themselves. And once again I was failing in this aspect, I was shortsighted to think a single license would be enough to cover the needs of every type of user. A greater number of licensing options will be made available for Mayan EDMS.

There is a lot of confusion and dissertation when it comes to licensing and copyright issues. Unlike most topics of discussion where there are two main sides, opinions about licensing are incredibly varied with every opinion being an almost completely unique point of view. This diversity of opinion is great, but often confused with fragmentation, so great effort must be placed to avoid the discussion to degrade into an argument of License A vs. License B as it tends to happen, a lot.

And lastly, because it is the most important: Those that don’t understand the situation, will criticize you. Those that do not use your software, will criticize you even harder. Those that understand the situation and/or use your software, may voice their opinions, but will support your decisions and trust your judgment, it’s the reason they started putting their faith and efforts in your software in the first place.

PS: I still have a lot of email and comments to go through, if you haven’t received a reply from me you will soon as I answer each message with the attention each deserves.

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I have a full time day job and Mayan EDMS provides some side income by means of my own startup (Documen.to), I’m have been well aware that from the beginning people would make money from it, a lot more than me too. Even the stand alone consultants are probably doing more money than me and the corporations are most certainly doing a lot more, so, as I said that doesn’t bother me in fact it is something that has been promoted from day one. Some people are doing consulting (Quinta Group), others are doing service level agreements, others are doing cloud deployments (Appsembler), others selling turn-key solutions integrating Mayan EDMS with scanning and printing equipment, others want to sell repackaged versions of Mayan EDMS (JTP) others are selling document appliances (RTM-IT). All that doesn’t bothers me in fact I feel proud my software and the choice of license I use is creating commercial opportunities for so many.

This is also not an issue of the GPL being defective, or about me not reading or applying the GPL incorrectly, and certainly not about GPL vs. BSD vs. MIT vs. Apache, etc. While I do appreciate the suggestions about the license change, I will stick with the GPL. The GPL is not complicated, its basic premise is actually simple: you get software with certain freedoms, you can do whatever you want with it as long as those freedoms remain unchanged.

If you look at the changelog, there have been 20 releases so far in about a year and a half, please point out where in my past communications I have said I intend to change the licenses of all those previous releases or the license of the current release. The GPL actually doesn’t allows that, it protects the code itself from everybody including from myself. If I were to stop working on Mayan EDMS, anyone can continue working and releasing new versions, and that is the beauty of it. That is something that doesn’t happens with commercial software, in the commercial setting when the company decides the product is dead, it is dead and there is nothing the end users can do about it.

Some action is better than no action, restricting access to the development branch has been criticized, but it is managing to weed out non compliance and sending a message of the seriousness with which the GPL, the copyright issues and the contributions of the community are being taken. The community has been supportive of this decision as they understand what is at stake and the reasons behind it.

If the development were to continue behind doors, that is not a GPL violation, the GPL doesn’t dictate development procedure, so development can be done with limited access and when ready, released and it will still be valid Free and Open Source software.

I don’t mind people charging for their services in relation to Mayan EDMS or for Mayan EDMS itself, within the terms of the GPL it can be resold for a reasonable fee, in the same way I can download Ubuntu, burn a CD and charge a percent over the costs of the CD and the cost of the download, that same situation is allowed for Mayan EDMS. Reasonable is open to interpretation but $999.00 per seat license is not a reasonable fee if your are also changing copyrights, not releasing the source code and marketing it as an original product. That is callous, it is a copyright infringement and a GPL infringement.

Given the amount of flame I’ve gotten in my inbox for this I’m reassured that not releasing the information of the non compliant products was the best course of action and a decision that eventually led to the resolution of this issue. I cannot however, guarantee that will be the case in the future.

Finally, I am very happy to inform that 2 of the original non compliant products as well as many other individuals have come forward with the intent to comply with the GPL or reach some kind of licensing agreement.

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'%d - %d' % (int(metadata.quantity) / 100 * 100, int(metadata.quantity) / 100 * 100 + 100)

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