An Open Letter to the Kurogo Open Source Community
Andrew Yu
Dear Kurogo Open Source Developers:
My name is Andrew Yu, and I am the founder and CTO of Modo Labs, Inc.
As many of you are aware, Modo Labs is the company behind both the Kurogo open source project, as well as the commercial version of Kurogo Mobile Campus. Five years ago, when we started Modo Labs, we also started the Kurogo open source project to primarily work with universities to provide a viable open source product for creating mobile web applications. I’m personally pleased that many organizations around the world have taken advantage of the project. A large number of these organizations have since licensed the commercial version of Kurogo Mobile Campus to acquire full support and additional functionality from Modo Labs.
For some time, Modo Labs has been prioritizing its resources on the commercial version of Kurogo to fully address the ever increasing complexity and demands of the mobile application market. For example, we released Kurogo 2.0 early last year as a commercial source Software as a Service product. This version included advanced new features designed to make it easy for both developers and non-technical staff to create and maintain sophisticated mobile web and native apps in the cloud (we have since released multiple upgrades, including Kurogo v 2.3). We plan to continue prioritizing our resources to upgrade this commercial system for the foreseeable future.
We have considered open sourcing some part of Kurogo 2.x, but it is not possible at this time due to other company commitments. Updating the open source project to a more recent release will require significant resources, and support. We will continue to re-evaluate the open source project, but we can not provide any assurance that this situation will change in the foreseeable future.
You are welcome to continue to use Kurogo 1.x. But, for those of you who would like to convert from Kurogo 1.x to 2.x, we will offer a significant discount to ease the transition to the commercially supported version. We can also provide training on Kurogo 2.
The commercial version of Kurogo also includes access to source code, as well as Kurogo package manager that allows developers to easily install custom modules from other institutions. Many customers already have taken advantage of the ability to develop custom modules and also share with other institutions using Kurogo 2.x. Modo Labs will focus on the customer developers to make it easier for them to share their code. Other extensions enable non-developers to build mobile apps (including native) that are significantly more powerful than is possible by a developer using the 1.x platform.
If you are interested, please contact in...@modolabs.com.
Given where we came from, I personally hope that Modo Labs may some day be in a position to support the open source model the right way that supports both our customers and the open source community in a meaningful way.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Andrew