Hi @StephanieGoulet , welcome and thanks for your consideration,
I’ll try to answer your questions:
That’s right, for now we are still working on to many core things and the team lacks resources to onboard new contributors, but we ultimately want to open the project to contribution. We also want to develop a plugin system to cater to specific needs we might not want to support in the main app.
From what we know that is the case. The project is still maintained by the team behind the official SaaS in order to keep it running, but the project is no longer evolving and the original team is no longer working on the project.
Yes exactly, Tenzu is Taiga-Next reborn ;)
Sorry about the information about this being scattered, we did try to document it but it was a bit of a journey!
Now about our financial state (and there is no secret here, we are fully committed to transparency):
We are currently 3 people working full time on this (we were 6 at the start but part of the team left pretty quickly after we adopted Tenzu, mostly because we needed to lower the wages of everyone in order to make this project viable in the long run until it can take off).
Since you found our post about our first annual financial report, I can add that in the meantime, we were selected for an NlNet grant (more details in the last section here) which is financing our current work to get features parity with Taiga for the kanban module.
With only what we have now, admitting we don’t manage to secure any other source of income in the meantime, we currently have a runway until the end of 2027, which is plenty of time to get Tenzu much further than it is now.
We already thought about the worst-case scenario, if that happen, most of the team will take bread-and-butter job and continue to work on Tenzu on the side. We love this project and are committed to see it through no matter what. Of course, that would slow development a fair bit and impact quality so this would be last recourse.
We are not worried though, Taiga has a huge users base (20M+) so even the most pessimistic of our projection ensure the adventure continue.
There has also been recent global acknowledgement in Europe that depending on proprietary American software might be a tiny bit risky, so there is a lot of interest in us coming from this also.
Our company has also started investing some time into another project: LaSuite.coop, which is an open French cooperative that offers opensource hosting of a GAFAM suite alternative (if you speak French, the presentation video is pretty awesome).
We are not afraid to diversify our activity a bit (according to our values) in order to make the company more robust and ensure we continue to be there for years to come :)
What we are never considering however, is external investment from VCs that want shares and decision power, because we want to preserve Tenzu independency; that’s why we chose the cooperative model.
I hope this can make you more confident that we’re here to stay ;)
If you haven’t yet, we would love to get your feedback on what you need from Tenzu by filling the form we have ongoing to know about our potential users base better :)
And, of course, please feel free to ask any other questions you may have.