Welcome to Mayan EDMS
Open source, Django based document manager with custom meta-data indexing, file serving integration, document tagging and OCR capabilities.
The DMS market is a very big revenue market, there are just few but big players, now do the math. Mayan EDMS was never very well received into this market, from it's Wikipedia article being erased to its entries being removed from open source DMS software directories and press releases being sometimes ignored, I'm used to this kind of situation, such is life, this is not a tantrum.
I have a full time day job and Mayan EDMS provides some side income by means of my own startup (Documen.to), I'm have been well aware that from the beginning people would make money from it, a lot more than me too. Even the stand alone consultants are probably doing more money than me and the corporations are most certainly doing a lot more, so, as I said that doesn't bother me in fact it is something that has been promoted from day one. Some people are doing consulting (Quinta Group), others are doing service level agreements, others are doing cloud deployments (Appsembler), others selling turn-key solutions integrating Mayan EDMS with scanning and printing equipment, others want to sell repackaged versions of Mayan EDMS (JTP) others are selling document appliances (RTM-IT). All that doesn't bothers me in fact I feel proud my software and the choice of license I use is creating commercial opportunities for so many.
This is also not an issue of the GPL being defective, or about me not reading or applying the GPL incorrectly, and certainly not about GPL vs. BSD vs. MIT vs. Apache, etc. While I do appreciate the suggestions about the license change, I will stick with the GPL. The GPL is not complicated, its basic premise is actually simple: you get software with certain freedoms, you can do whatever you want with it as long as those freedoms remain unchanged.
If you look at the changelog, there have been 20 releases so far in about a year and a half, please point out where in my past communications I have said I intend to change the licenses of all those previous releases or the license of the current release. The GPL actually doesn't allows that, it protects the code itself from everybody including from myself. If I were to stop working on Mayan EDMS, anyone can continue working and releasing new versions, and that is the beauty of it. That is something that doesn't happens with commercial software, in the commercial setting when the company decides the product is dead, it is dead and there is nothing the end users can do about it.
Some action is better than no action, restricting access to the development branch has been criticized, but it is managing to weed out non compliance and sending a message of the seriousness with which the GPL, the copyright issues and the contributions of the community are being taken. The community has been supportive of this decision as they understand what is at stake and the reasons behind it.
If the development were to continue behind doors, that is not a GPL violation, the GPL doesn't dictate development procedure, so development can be done with limited access and when ready, released and it will still be valid Free and Open Source software.
I don't mind people charging for their services in relation to Mayan EDMS or for Mayan EDMS itself, within the terms of the GPL it can be resold for a reasonable fee, in the same way I can download Ubuntu, burn a CD and charge a percent over the costs of the CD and the cost of the download, that same situation is allowed for Mayan EDMS. Reasonable is open to interpretation but $999.00 per seat license is not a reasonable fee if your are also changing copyrights, not releasing the source code and marketing it as an original product. That is callous, it is a copyright infringement and a GPL infringement.
Given the amount of flame I've gotten in my inbox for this I'm reassured that not releasing the information of the non compliant products was the best course of action and a decision that eventually led to the resolution of this issue. I cannot however, guarantee that will be the case in the future.
Finally, I am very happy to inform that 2 of the original non compliant products as well as many other individuals have come forward with the intent to comply with the GPL or reach some kind of licensing agreement.
To all the people telling me to f****** learn to read and to RTFM the GPL: I have read the GPL, this is not my first project being released as Free software, as Open Source software or under the GPL (Descartes BI, Django-replication, pdf-form-fill). It is also not the first project to enjoy widespread use and to be released as a commercial product by other people (Django-inventory), however in those instances the people doing the forks have complied with the GPL admirably providing source code for their changes, retaining all copyrights, notices and original license even when being released under a different name. That however is not the situation that is happening now. This is not "whinnying over some little program" (as it is being described commonly in the feedback I'm getting via email), the GPL is no less legal than a commercial license and must be followed and enforced equally, Mayan EDMS is not some "little program" currently sporting 26,000 lines of code. And just because a program is being released as Free Open Source software doesn't make it any less valuable than a commercial counterpart. Finally the entire source was not removed, only the development branch and the hotfix branch for the next version. Let me repeat that again, the entire source code was NOT removed only the TWO (2) latest unreleased branches. Lastly about the commercial competition issue: If I have no problems with people or business making money off Mayan EDMS, in fact I proud myself in creating commercial opportunities to others by advertising them, right here, in this very website, on the top menu, three tabs to the right. I hope this clarifies and overturns some of the misinformation being circulated, thank you.
I choose to release Mayan EDMS under the GPL which means you get the source code of the software plus the freedom to use it, modify it and pass it on forward to other people. I share the fruits of my labor and all that you are asked to do is share what you build on top of Mayan EDMS too. If being given the software with all these liberties and that simple requirement wasn't enough, Mayan EDMS is also provided free of charge, it cost you $0.00 to download, install or use, there is no registration required, there are no limitation of the amount of user, roles, group, folders, documents, indexes or features, unlike most other open source document management software in the market. However that doesn't mean Mayan EDMS is public domain and that it belongs to everybody, that's the only thing I'm keeping for myself, it is my property but I'm choosing to share it with you. If you fork Mayan EDMS into a closed or private respository, stop and think about what you are doing because you going about it the wrong way. Likewise if you fork Mayan EDMS and the first patch you commit is to change the name, stop. It has come to my attention that there are a number of unauthorized forks of Mayan EDMS being offered for download as if the original version was being abandoned and at least one fork is being sold with a comercial license to add insult to injury. These violators have been listed in a new page called GPL violations.
How will this affect the future of Mayan EDMS? It is too early to tell, what is certain is that the latest technologies being added to Mayan EDMS must be protected until they are ready to be released. Taking this into account and effective inmediately the development branch has been removed from the public repository until I figure out what to do or that it is finished and ready for public release as the next version of Mayan EDMS.
This has been a very exciting development cycle, many new additions are making their way into the code as well as third party project support.
A huge thanks go to RTM-IT corp. for their donation of Citadel, their commercial clustering product for Mayan EDMS. Citadel is now part of the Free Open Source version of Mayan EDMS and available for everyone to use and enjoy! We hope that along with RTM-IT Corp. and SeeOpen S.r.l. other commercial organizations step up and contribute to the core of what Mayan EDMS is. If you make money somehow from Mayan EDMS please consider giving something back to the community, whether it is monetary donations, patches, testing and now that clustering is an integral part of Mayan EDMS, hardware for a server farm for testing will be needed, so every bit helps.
Another great news is that the first mobile app specifically designed for Mayan EDMS is in the works by Pablo Juan Rivera (orangethirty).
Along with a major refactoring of every internal code from navigation to tool registration some frequently requested additions have been implemented and added like: a complete move to Django 1.4, a bootstrap app to create metadata, indexes and document types to help user get up and running faster when installing Mayan EDMS for the first time. Several more translations have made their way: Dutch (Lucas Weel), Bulgarian (Iliya Georgiev and Koldo) and French (Pierre Lhoste). Full migration to South, this will make upgrade from this next version onwards much easier. Trash can support, a Pygments renderer to support colorized display of code files, initial implementation of retention policies and many more fixes and small updates everywhere.
This is the second maintenance release of the 0.12 series. Issues covered in this version: more secure auto admin creation, new logo in place, installation environment report app for remote debugging, anonymous statistics gathering, German translation by Tetja Rediske and Tilmann Sittig and a fix for the duplicated extension bug when uploading a new document version. One new feature of importance is the ability to check out documents effectively blocking new versions of the document while the original user that checked out the document updates it. For more information read the full release notes.
Appsembler.com has graciously offered to provide a free 30 day trial of Mayan EDMS on their breakthrough SaaS platform for completing this survey!
Mostly a bug fix release, but three very important improvements made into this version. The document text parsing subsystem has been re-factored to allow several parsers per file type, a new PDF parser based on poppler-utils's pdftotext utility submited by Brian E. was also added. This is now the default method Mayan EDMS will execute to try to extract text from a PDF file and failing that will fallback to the previous method. Be sure to install the poppler-utils OS package to take advantage of this new parser. Also added is an improved office document conversion method that doesn't rely on unoconv to work, aside from this mayor improvements other changes made it into this release: complete Italian translation, an automated install method using a Fabric file (fabfile) that supports single, multiple and heterogeneous deployments, the installation documentation was also updated. The OCR queue is now active by default when first created during the syncdb phase and the OCR_AUTOMATIC_OCR option now defaults to True. These two changes are made to reduce the steps required for new users to start enjoying the benefits of automatic text extraction from uploaded documents without having to read the documentation and have a more functional default install. As always full documentation as well a release notes can be found at readthedocs.com
With the recent removal of Mayan EDMS's article from Wikipedia, because of a lack of notability according to the editors that tagged it, a renewed effort to gather statistics in underway. If you are using, planning to use or just interested in Mayan EDMS please take a moment to fill out this simple survey.
I will be doing a Google plus hangout to answer questions about Mayan EDMS and document management for those using it or planning to use it. So if you have a Google Plus account drop by Wednesday March 14, 2012 at about 7:00pm AST for the first ever Mayan EDMS Hangout!
Two very much requested features have landed in the development version of Mayan EDMS: The ability to send documents or document links via email and to be able to receive document as attachments via email and process them automatically.
So head over to Github and clone the latest development branch to start using and testing these new features.
Almost 3 months in the making and 1 year after it was initially started, version 0.12 of Mayan EDMS is now available. Thanks to everybody that contributed in one way or another to make this possible! Highlights for this new version include:
For a more complete list of the new features, changes and removed items read the Version 0.12 release notes.
To increase communication between users of Mayan EDMS, a Google group has been created, it is low volume and everything related to Mayan EDMS will be discussed there.
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Still many things left to do, but after much work the ACL subsystem is in a usable state. Document level access is already supported with folder and tag level access following suit.
The Italian translation for Mayan EDMS has been completed, merged in the development branch and will be included in the upcoming version 0.12. Many thanks to SeeOpen.IT for this contribution.
This is the first bugfix release of the .11 series, and includes the following:
Two of the most asked features have been included:
The full changelog can be found here: http://readthedocs.org/docs/mayan
Multiple document versions is almost ready and will be included in the next version (v0.11), the REST API has also been updated to expose this new functionality.
Digital signature verification has seen many updates but it is still uncertain if it will be complete enough to be included in the next version.
