Ping: Is this project still alive?

[pabloxio]

Hi there,

I love the awless project. But I'm wondering:

• Is this project still under active development?
• Is it worth submitting PRs anymore?
• Are you going to deprecate the project?

I'd like to contribute and get involve with the project.

[simcap]

Thanks @pabloxio . We loved it as well!

Bluntly said unfortunately, this project has stopped, no development is done on it and it is not worth submitting PRs. I was a contributor but I am no longer in the company (Wallix)

[simcap]

So to answer your question, it is not alive and not maintained anymore, and it has been a long time this way.

[hbbio]

We indeed all left Wallix and we don't have access to the repository anymore... so we have to declare it dead for now (history of open source software is quite surprising).

[pabloxio]

Sorry to hear that :( Thanks for the info. A couple of questions:

• Any fork or alternative project that I should be aware of?
• I'm not a License expert but.... would the Apache license 2.0 allow us just to fork the project and continue development with a new name?

[hbbio]

There are forks but I am not aware of any taking over the others.

The Apache license allows them of course, but most of the users/webpages end up here so restarting the project would require some kind of long-term commitment for a successful move.

Note that there is a significant testing cost as the extensive test suite creates many AWS resources and some of them are quite pricy. Either AWS would be willing to give some free usage or the project would require another corporate sponsor...

[simcap]

Note that it is only smoke tests (see smoke_tests directory, https://github.com/wallix/awless/tree/master/smoke_tests) that are costly in term of creating AWS resources. We used smoke tests only for each new releases.

awless was implemented and designed (mostly through test driven) to be extensively tested with the regular go test ./... command that requires no costs or dependency.

[luisdavim]

This is really sad, is there any way to contact Wallix to see if access can be given to this project or if we can move it to some other org to be maintained by the community?

[luisdavim]

@flashcode @jonathanpoelen @julienvitard can you help? It would be great if you could give some people contributor access if you don't have time to maintain this project anymore or maybe we can agree on using some fork to continue it outside of the Wallix org and have the readme updated to point to that location.

[res0nat0r]

The only cli alternative I've found that is somewhat close is bash-my-aws, I don't like it as much because listing instances is extremely slow compared to awless, plus things like not supporting a -r / --region flag and having to set an AWS_DEFAULT_REGION is quite annoying since I'm constantly switching between aws profiles and accounts.

If anyone knows of any other cli alternatives that format data nicely in the terminal I'm all ears.

[luisdavim]

It's a shame that Wallix has abandoned this project and is not willing to give anyone access to maintain it....

[hbbio]

@luisdavim FYI I sent an email to Serge, the CTO at Wallix, reminding them about the current situation and asking them to transfer to a neutral org, where other contributors and myself could manage contributions and keep the project alive

We could start a fork but since the project is currently abandoned, it makes just more sense to transfer it properly with the issues, wiki, etc. The initial copyright won't change of course, so Wallix will still be able to claim awless paternity so I sincerely hope that they will accept :)

[luisdavim]

Awesome, thanks so much @hbbio

[triwats]

Let us know if you get anything back @hbbio - was using awless as a power user and it became a crucial tool in my monitoring workflow. Now my laptop broke and there's no support for the new M1 Macbook.

[naumchenko]

@hbbio thank you indeed, we better inherit as is, rather than fork, any update so far if we can submit PRs to it? I am prepping a PR for CentOS 8.

Guys, this tool is amazing we gotta get this shit rolling.

[hbbio]

Turns out Serge has left Wallix too.

If anyone else at Wallix can read this, please write me or call me! I started this project to give Wallix a positive image in tech communities... it's still time to fulfil that goal.