Hi,
I’ll switch to english hoping that this is ok for all readers.
We havent worked on a UCS 4.2 version of PLUCS for a couple of reasons. The main reason is (surprise!); money. PLUCS is completely free and until now there was nothing which could compensate the time and money needed for a new release.
At the time we released the first version of PLUCS we hoped that we could get at least some customers who would ask for commercial support. Beside one paid enhancement request regarding the integration of mod_filter which was published last year this was unfortunately not the case.
We see still some new installations of PLUCS as we get informed about these events. But we dont know anything about installations in production apart from companies we have in our contact list through other channels. I have asked the responsible people at Univention more than one year ago to get at least a number of running installations but did not get any data until now. (yes, this data is available but not passed to the app vendors).
Nearly 2 years ago we decided to put the sources on Github (https://github.com/it25gmbh/plucs). There have been some contributions by Univention staff and another Univention partner but I did not have the feeling that there is a larger interest. There have been 3 pull requests which have been merged last year.
In December we have been contacted by Univention regarding the dockerization of PLUCS. At this time I have stated clearly that we are not going to put additional work into a task which would not bring additional functionality without knowing about chances to refund the effort. In addition I offered to fork PLUCS and continue to those who get the highest value from this integration. During the last months I have renewed this offering. There seems to be interest but nobody has decided yet,
Based on the usual behaviour with earlier upgrades of UCS I would expect that upgrades are not possible if there is any component installed which is not available for UCS 4.2.
As there seems to be a valid interest for PLUCS on UCS 4.2 I have already escalated my question to the sales and product team at Univention. In addition I had the idea to start a crowd funding campain for the new release: I havent put much time to search for an appropriate platform and other related things but I do have an idea how much working time we would need to publish a new version.
If anyone is interested to donate in general and without the commitment to a specific amount please contact me either here or through any other channel. If I get at least 5 responses within the next 2 weeks I will search for a funding platform.
Thanks for reading,
Dirk Ahrnke