Hi,
I joined today the forum and I’m trying to access links from this post User Manual for beginner - #4 by Harvey without no success.
Am I missing anything after registration?
Best,
MC
Hi,
That link is points to a Knowledge base article, a premium content area that requires a subscription.
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Hi @roberto.rosario,
I’m really surprised with having premium content on a forum related to an open source project, specially after reading some other posts like:
- https://forum.mayan-edms.com/t/is-mayan-a-future-proof-investment/747: No reply on the post
- https://forum.mayan-edms.com/t/state-and-governance-of-the-project/291: Closed by you with no official response.
I remember the old phpBB forum where there were a lot of useful information. I was a member on it since 2019-2020 and it was the reason I decided to start using Mayan EDMS for me to try to be paper-free. I even asked for best practices and tutorial which resulted in the following post (Mayan EDMS Organisation Concepts Introduction - Mayan EDMS community forum).
After seeing the new model, and I don’t want to think in a bad way about what happened with the old forum, I’m not sure about the future of the project and specially after reading the linked post were there were not official answer from you.
As this is for personal use, I’m considering moving to file-system approach which will be an efort after using Mayan EDMS since 2020.
Please, let me know your thoughts.
Regards,
MC
Hi,
I rarely reply to posts like this (or the ones linked). As a maintainer, regardless of what I say or how I say it, it will be misunderstood or mischaracterized as abusive or as an emotional breakdown.
I will do so this time, in much detail, to attempt to put to rest permanently, the issues presented.
I’m really surprised with having premium content on a forum related to an open source project, specially after reading some other posts like:
Free software has always been about freedom, not about low or no cost.
Richard Stallman’s own revised biography (Free as in Freedom 2.0) is a good starting point.
- https://forum.mayan-edms.com/t/is-mayan-a-future-proof-investment/747: No reply on the post
Is any product future-proof?
Even banks with 150 years of existence like Lehman Brothers, can collapse overnight. Same goes with banks with a quarter of a trillion dollars in assets like First Republic Bank, Signature Bank, and First Republic Bank.
When attempting to grade the risk of using Mayan, don’t apply unrealistic expectation that even proprietary products would not fulfill.
Mayan has existed and been active for 12 years. It is older than Kubernetes and Docker.
- https://forum.mayan-edms.com/t/state-and-governance-of-the-project/291: Closed by you with no official response.
Everything written by the original poster was false, incorrect, or misleading on purpose. It was somebody trying to stir up controversy.
I remember the old phpBB forum where there were a lot of useful information. I was a member on it since 2019-2020 and it was the reason I decided to start using Mayan EDMS for me to try to be paper-free. I even asked for best practices and tutorial which resulted in the following post (Mayan EDMS Organisation Concepts Introduction - Mayan EDMS community forum).
At that time we had Rob as a dedicated forum moderator and manager. Sadly he moved on to other things and it was once again up to part time volunteers to manage the forum.
After seeing the new model, and I don’t want to think in a bad way about what happened with the old forum, I’m not sure about the future of the project and specially after reading the linked post were there were not official answer from you.
The old forum is no more in part for the lack of community volunteers. There is a lot of work to do and very few people step up to do it. So we looked outside the community for new members. Sadly one of the new members was a bad actor looking to harm the project from inside.
We have many layers of protection to these events and we managed to restore everything back very quickly. Unfortunately the bad actor also managed to destroy the most recent backups of the forum.
This is why we started with a blank slate in 2023 with the Discourse forum software with an automatic backup setup to object storage. This new setup is times more expensive than hosting a PHP based forum.
Why the knowledge base?
As explained in the post:
It is the result of the many consultations with book supporters, support customers, resellers, and users.
The book was a good start but after several iterations of the new draft, the result was always a split opinion. It became clear that a static book cannot be everything for everyone.
As so was born the idea of an evergreen book.
- Free product
- High quality product
- Free service
- High quality service
- Free documentation
- High quality documentation
As much as I would like to, we can’t deliver all of these with no cost to you, because we have a lot of cost to cover too to make all of this possible.
Costs
Keeping a project as big and complex as Mayan for 12 years costs a lot of money. We receive just a few services for free. Anything self hosted requires a dedicated server, backup storage, and a domain. We keep all services in separate hosts to lower the chances of complete blackouts. We have redundancy on almost all services. Even each email account of the project has a cost.
For code we have the free GitLab account, paid GitLab accounts, plus multiple self hosted instances in physical server and virtual server in many regions.
Mayan, the code, the project, the company, the IP, and us at the personal level are under constant legal attacks. Our monthly expenses on legal fees alone is $1,395 USD.
We have virtual server, colocations, and physical on-site equipment.
This is my office rack with all the Mayan servers. My power bill is $700 USD per month. I also have multiple WAN services as do most of the team members. To deal with the constant power outages experienced by the bad infrastructure of Puerto Rico, on the bottom, those are 1500VA Rack mounted Eaton UPS with network cards. Shipped to Puerto Rico they cost $1,600 USD each, that’s $4,800 on backup power alone. Battery packs last about 3-6 months. It costs $600 to replace each.
We don’t use consumer hardware, instead we buy off-lease enterprise equipment like LTO tape drives. Tapes are purchased new and rotate for 52 weeks.
To keep the tapes safe when in storage off-site, we use Turtle cases. Each 20 tape case cost $197. The case requires two locks. We use ABUS pick resistant locks at $66 each. That’s $329 (without shipping or taxes) just to protect 1 backup set. Add in the off site storage cost for each backup set.
We have on hand spare of equipment to minimize downtime even on hardware failures.
As workstation, I personally own 2 or 3 ThinkPad laptops of each models and screen sizes. Other members prefer HPs or Macs but we regard laptops as disposable only having the minimal content on them in case of lost, damage, or theft. Hard drives are encrypted and in the case on the ThinkPads, firmware is flashed to Coreboot for increased privacy and security.
We favor laptops because during emergencies they can be powered very easily. Couples with satellite internet like Starlink, it is very rare for us not be able to work even after hurricanes, tornadoes, or typhoons pass over our locations.
It would be hard to find any other open source document management software that takes itself and its operations as seriously as we do.
If after we taking this much care and attention for 12 years for consistent project performance and innovation, you are not convinced by Mayan and our teams’ track records, then the problem is not on our side.
I hope this finally puts to rest the concerns about our ability and dedication to continue the project for the foreseeable future.
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I understand perfectly, Roberto. Since June 2017, I have been involved in the project of polonizing The Elder Scrolls Online. As a volunteer, we have been translating the MMORPG game with the largest amount of text in history for six years.
Over these six years, our project has moved from translating in “notepad” to using the weblate platform. We were forced to purchase our own server, which was located in a private house. Systems, backup drives, etc.
Recently, we decided to collect funds for a small off-grid system to reduce electricity costs.
We have faced enormous hate from the very beginning. We also started explaining how to spend every penny we received.
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Beautifully explained!
Thank you @roberto.rosario and the Mayan teams for all the work you do!
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Excellent post. Glad I trust all of our documents to Mayan and its professional team.
Zero acknowledgement from the OP?
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Hi @roberto.rosario,
First of all, appreciate all the time you spent to reply to my posts and let us, not just me but also all mayan users about the context, reason, past events and costs.
I also think the reply to my OP was considered offensive, which was not my intention as I just wanted to have some visibility (which you provided). If you understood it as offensive, my apologies. This is a common problem for not native english speakers.
Let me comment, not reply, to some of those.
I understand you don’t reply to every single post questioning about the project or complaining about it, but from time to time is good to provide visibility to users/community/subscribed users.
Fully agree, but it should be different domestic users or commercial usage. I understand the cost of running any project is high as you explained in detail. That’s why almost all OSS projects include the option to donate or “buy-me a coffee” option.
Sorry to hear about it when there had been a great effort during this years in the community or other project areas.
From my side, no concern about your ability nor dedication for the project. But as mentioned before visibility is important for any OSS project.
I like to take my time to reply to these long replies for not missunderstanding my reply as I think it was previously done. I even posted another question yesterday on the forum.
As a suggestion related to the subscription model for the forum. Considering ocasional users (home users) and enterprise users in the same model it goes against those ocasional users.
I could go and reply to all the different bullets you provided, but, again, my comments could be misunderstood as I did it in a constructive way and not destructive.
Please, go ahead and close the post and I think it shouldn’t go further.
Regards,
MC
Don’t mirror what rosarior said as a cop out. I got what you said and what you meant, it was pretty clear.
You also meant what you said. Don’t play coy now.
Even after you got the responses you thought you were entitled to, instead of accepting you were wrong you doubled down!
You think you are entitled by the maintainers to explain themselves to you.
You think you are entitled to “transparency” from an open source project, of all things!
You think you are entitled to free content because you are a home user.
You think you are entitled to tell the maintainers how they should raise funds for the project.
You complained topics were closed without proper responses to your satisfaction.
Now that you got what you wanted you want the topic closed to avoid the responsibility to respond to any criticism.
The sheer entitlement! People like you are why so many maintainers abandon their projects.
Stereotypical professional victim. If don’t agree with how a project is being run, don’t stick around, leave. Don’t ruin it for the rest of us.
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Superb! Thank you for that in depth explanation. Relieved and happy we chose Mayan for all our document needs.
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This is a good example of the issue I brought up before.
While I agree with everything @victmasi wrote in spirit, it was something best left unsaid. I’m sure pretty much everyone else was thinking it too.
I propose a temporary suspension for @victmasi for behavior and @mcarlosro for breaking the trust of the maintainers and fellow community members.
I also propose this topic remain open as it has a wealth of information about the inner workings of the project that will surely put to rest any newcomers’ doubts about the capabilities of the Mayan team.
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I disagree. This is a topic that should have been closed the moment @roberto.rosario correctly replied to the opening post. Nobody is entitled to explanations of how the Mayan teams run things internally. What makes a project open source is the license not that it is “transparent”. Only nonprofits need to be transparent.
But I do agree that a suspension for @mcarlosro is appropriate.
After seeing the new model, and I don’t want to think in a bad way about what happened with the old forum,
This is a thinly veiled accusation. From a person with no standing towards the person making the whole thing possible.
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Yes! Love these! My point exactly!
Played my part, and wrote what everybody else was thinking. Don’t mind being muted for a while.