Parthenon is now available under GPLv3 and the Skeleton Application is available under the MIT License. When I was doing sales calls with companies about Parthenon part of the risk factor was what if I decided this project wasn't viable as a business. Every time, I said I would open source the code and continue to work on it. Well, I decided a year ago that I needed to change my approach and focus on a single area instead of trying to solve lots of problems as Parthenon does. So I created BillaBear, which uses Parthenon, to focus on billing. Which is actually building the billing system I wanted in Parthenon.

Today is the release of Parthenon 2.1. It's a small release putting in some nice little features before big drive to build a powerful billing system starts. It has one key feature which is the Data Export Module. Which I think will be super useful to companies that deal with data exports from their system. Then there are a few minor features which will help will small little issues.

I've started to document the design decisions made for Parthenon. One of the main decisions made was to make classes that aren't meant to be extended to be final. There are many schools of thought when it comes to development. With many people having different opinions about when and why to use final classes, I thought I would add my opinion to the mix.

Decision​

The decision was made to make classes that aren't meant to be extended final. All final classes should have an interface that matches their publicly available methods.

Today we're announcing the release of Parthenon 2.0. With this release, there are updates like all other releases. But the main change is that Parthenon is now available under the Business Source License. This means that it is now free to use Parthenon for non-production use, such as: development, testing, and evaluation. We're also granting an additional usage for production use to those generating less than $5,000 US Dollars a month. Previously, Parthenon was only available for a fee.

GDPR has been in place for years now, and we’re starting to learn more and more about how it’s going to be enforced and what it really means. The many questions people had that could only be answered by court decisions have now been answered. Over the past years, I’ve seen systems try and fail to correct implement GDPR. Here are the things I’ve learnt from court decisions and from mistakes made.