We recently had a question on our forums asking if GroundWork Monitor CE 6.0 is “dead”.

Since the forums are mostly focused on technical issues, and this is a company policy question, we’ve decided to respond on our company blog. We’ve also edited into a Q&A format to make the responses a little easier to digest.

Q. Is GroundWork Monitor Community Edition dead?
A. No, it’s not dead. While it is true that GroundWork has not issued an update to GroundWork Monitor Community Edition in over a year, we have not made any decision that there won’t be any updates in the future, or any decision to ‘kill’ the Community Edition. Also, if you have code contributions you would like to make to GroundWork Monitor Community Edition, we would absolutely welcome them.

Q. Why is Community Edition not on the web site?
A. Community Edition is still available for download. It was moved from the GWOS site to MonitoringForge.org in order to make it easier to navigate our site and to reflect the growing popularity of our other products. (More on this below.)

Q. Why haven’t you made any recent updates to the Community Edition?
We have found many people who used to use our free software-only (no support, no training) Community Edition actually prefer our Enterprise Quickstart. This gives them the software, Enterprise features, training and support they’re looking for a very low price ($49 for the regular version, $59 for the virtual appliance variants).

Q. Can’t you continue to develop both Community Edition and Enterprise Edition?
A. We would love to do both at the same time but our engineering resources are limited so we have to trade-off based on our customer, company and community needs. In many cases our contractual obligations to take care of the needs of our paying customers comes first.

One of the reasons we chose to bring the Enterprise Quickstart to market was because it’s the exact same codebase as our regular GroundWork Monitor Enterprise subscription, from an engineering point of view, and it enables many more people access to our flagship product.