Okazanta was meant to revive Cachet – but now it's dead, too

The history around the once thriving and widely used open source status page project "Cachet", continues. Cachet was used as status page and incident overview by thousands of tech companies. But the project became stale over the last few years and wouldn't work with PHP versions newer than 7.3.

Then a community fork arrived. Okazanta was forked from Cachet Q4 2022 with the goal to update the outdated Cachet code-base to run on newer (and supported) PHP versions and to fix security and other important bugs. We wrote about that fork in October 2022.

However anyone trying to migrate Cachet to Okazanta in the past months came across a new problem: Once forked, Okazanta didn't really move forward either.

An issue opened on the GitHub repository of Okazanta asked the fair question:

Is this project active?

https://github.com/Okazanta/okazanta-legacy/issues/43

And, unfortunately to the project, the project owner John-S4 replied:

I created this fork of Cachet with all of the best intentions and really wanting to make something happen with it.

But… in the last few months, life, and commitments to other projects, have taken over and I have found that I actually do not have any of the time that I expected that I would to lead or take much part in this project, despite my good intentions I over-commited myself, and I am sorry.

John-S4, maintainer Okazanta

Ironically but sadly, this is the same reason why Cachet was abandoned by its founder.

If there's a lesson here it's that maintaining an open source project isn't easy at all. It requires time and dedication to the project, willingness to help users, discuss code changes and strategic decisions with fellow project contributors.

In general, open source projects often lack appreciation and monetary support. There are a couple of people, sometimes only one person, behind each open source project. All these people have a life besides the project(s), most of the times anyways.

We have emerged into times, where a stable, maintained and fully supported open source project is expected. Which should not be the base expectation at all, especially for projects being developed as a side-kick without monetary benefits.