Introducing GeoServer Enterprise

Dear All,
we are happy to announce the creation of the GeoServer Enterprise project which has been developed by GeoSolutions leveraging on the Community version of GeoServer to provide long term support releases.

Superior Stability & Long Term Support Releases
GeoServer has recently adopted a Time Boxed Release model that results in a new major release every six months (and a bug fix release of the current stable series every month).
This is following closely the Release Early, Release Often  Open Source Mantra, and it’s required to avoid piling up too many new features in major releases (past difficulties to release a new major were due to the accumulation of new features).
While this approach is very good for entities sponsoring new developments and users interested in the major new features, it is not optimal for Enterprise environments where production deployments should only receive bug fixes and minor features but also usually require support for at least 1 year timeline or longer.

Selected Mature Extensions
Community GeoServer has a large number of extensions that can be installed and used for free. Some of them are actively supported, some are supported on case-by-case basis. In GeoServer Enterprise we decided to drop the extensions not actively supported in order to privilege stability and maturity over additional features. We also decided to include by default most of the supported extensions in order to reduce the complexity of configuring GeoServer (see here for a list of supported extensions).

An Enterprise Edition for GeoServer
In order to cope with this requirements we decided to create the GeoServer Enterprise project. The GeoServer Enterprise is currently based on GeoServer 2.2.x branch and is going to receive critical bug fixes and minor features until GeoServer 2.4.x branch will reach maturity (as per our plan this means release 2.4.4); at that point the 2.4.x branch will be used for the new release of GeoServer Enterprise.

Free and Open Source
GeoServer Enterprise is released as Free and Open Source software, under the same license as the standard GeoServer. The code is available on our github repository, where you can also find basic documentation and pointers to other sources of documentation.

Support Options
Community (free) Support will be initially provided via this google group which is open to all. If you are interested in professional support you can contact GeoSolutions or any other provider of professional services for GeoServer.

If you are interested in learning about how we can help you achieving your goals with our Open Source products and professional services, do not hesitate to contact us!

The GeoSolutions team,