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Parthenon Is Now Open Source

· 3 min read
Iain Cambridge

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.

Why two different licenses?

The main Parthenon bundle/library is available under GPL to ensure the freedom of others to use and share their modifications. The skeleton application is under MIT to allow people to do what I did with BillaBear and create a shareable application using Parthenon that they're able to license differently. Since Parthenon doesn't continue business logic it shouldn't affect anyone who is trying to create a business application since GPL doesn't (as far as I know) infect their code. However, if they were to use the skeleton application I believe it would infect their code and that would create a business risk for companies.

TL;DR - I want to allow people to relicense what they do with the skeleton application but not be able to do so with the core library.

Why isn't Parthenon viable?

One of the main problems with Parthenon and the marketplace is it isn't really what people want. It's positioned as a SaaS boilerplate, simply because that's what people understood and it does all of that. But it does a whole bunch of other things that are so out of scope for a Boilerplate. And that's simply because it was never meant to be a boilerplate. I had envisioned it as a "product framework" of sorts. No other boilerplate for example has A/B testing,

Another issue is the tech stack. If you look at who uses Symfony it's generally in-house development teams working on big long projects. If you look at what the cool kids use to build quick rapid projects it's generally in JavaScript or a similar stack. Even within the PHP space, Laravel is chosen by agencies and small developers to quickly build something due to how it simplifies the creation process while Symfony is about making it easier to maintain.

What's happening to Parthenon?

This isn't that Parthenon is no longer maintained. I'll be using Parthenon heavily for BillaBear and any re-usable features/components I create that I need for BillaBear features will be in Parthenon. So there are no plans to stop work on Parthenon it's just not been my focus for a while and almost certainly won't be for a while. I'm sure it will be my focus again one day.

You can find it at github.com/getparthenon

BillaBear

A small little plug for BillaBear. It's a Subscription Management and Billing System that is self-hostable. It's released under the FSL license that Sentry uses and basically just restricts creating a competing cloud billing service. It's self-hostable and I'm currently working on the SaaS version.

Website: BillaBear.com Github: github.com/billabear/billabear

SaaS Start Up Guide

Another little plug, a fortnightly newsletter that is written by experts in Finance, Law, and Tech that focuses on starting a SaaS company. So if you're thinking of creating a side project that earns you some money, you can check it out at https://saasstartupguide.substack.com/. (Substack so safe from spam)