The Lyons (9.02) release brings a lot of change – not only in the features we’ve added, but also in the mentality shift the engineering team will have when approaching the open source and commercial versions. These changes will be fleshed out in more detail over the coming weeks (a first pass can be seen here), but I wanted to talk before the release about one of the ways it’ll impact some of you in Lyons. (Unfortunately, this will entail me utilizing a bad four-letter word beginning with “f” and ending with “k”, so be prepared!)

Over the past few releases, MindTouch has focused its innovation on the core open source engine – this involved MindTouch Dream, the MindTouch API, DekiScript, and other aspects which will always be available to the open source community. While we are not neglecting this core engine in future releases, we will increasingly focus on differentiation between the open source and the commercial versions based on our customers’ feedback.

One of the most popular modules utilized in MindTouch Deki by our customers is the MindTouch LDAP module.  Over time, with the help of the participants of the LDAP forum, the LDAP module has grown into solid module with a great set of features and the ability to support a lot of different flavors of LDAP.

However, there is increased demand for more complex features, like nested group support. To that end, we have created a fork (ooh, there’s that nasty four letter word!) of the open source LDAP module to work on an commercial LDAP module. Max will have more details on this commercial LDAP module, but going into the future, all MindTouch work on LDAP (features + bug fixes) will be put into the commercial versions.

We will continue to ship the open source LDAP module in MindTouch packages - upgrading to Lyons will NOT cause your LDAP integration to break. We are maintaining the same SID for the open source LDAP, and have created a new SID for the commercial LDAP module. The LDAP module, still available in SVN, will essentially remain frozen in its 8.08 stage as an evolutionary dead-end. Any community members who want to submit patches are free to do so – we will still apply those for the open source module for you. All future packages (both open source + commercial) will contain both the open source and commercial LDAP modules, but our documentation and the LDAP helper in the control panel will reference the commercial SIDs.

I know this sets a dangerous precedent (this issue was not taken lightly internally – it took many heated discussions to reach this conclusion), but I want to reassure you that we are NOT going to be taking away key features that you already utilize that makes MindTouch great. Many of you have championed MindTouch, and we recognize that ripping away features from release to release reflects poorly on you, which is why the community has always remained at the forefront on ALL of our product decisions.

There is an ongoing conversation about this topic at the forums, so I invite you to join the discussion, and voice any concerns and complaints you have with this move. It’s my hope that this move will be a balance between our commercial interests and the needs of the open source community.