The past few months have been a whirlwind for me and for LibrePlan. As 2024 came to a close, I managed to squeeze in several updates just in time for November, ensuring that the latest translations made it into the project. Then came December and January—an intense period filled with holidays, administrative tasks, and, well, life.
But amongst all that, a major change happened: I emigrated to France. One of my main motivations? To be able to dedicate more time to LibrePlan.
LibrePlan has been a passion project for over 10 years now, but maintaining and improving an open-source project at this scale requires serious commitment. That’s why I submitted a funding proposal, hoping to secure resources needed to be able to focus full-time on maintenance and improvements. And recently, I received great news: I made it into round two! If successful, this funding would allow me to work on LibrePlan for a full year, bringing the code into a much better state of maintainability. The advent of AI will probably help tremendously in this endeavor—automating some of the tedious work and accelerating development in ways that weren’t possible even a few years ago.
That being said, I did miss something important this year: FOSDEM. For the first time in 20 years, I couldn’t attend due to a logistics challenge. It felt strange not being there, surrounded by the energy of the open-source community. But even from a distance, I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of LibrePlan and the broader open-source ecosystem.
Recently, I watched the talk entitled: “I beg you, please make your own GitHub alternatives!”. It’s not the easiest presentation to watch, but it made me pause. LibrePlan, like so many projects, is hosted on GitHub. Is that really the best place for it? Should we consider alternatives? The question isn’t just about infrastructure—it’s about control, longevity, and the values of open-source itself.
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Join the discussion on Discord: https://discord.gg/PDtpyPbaKv. Let’s figure out the best path forward—together.