MediaCore CE is now MediaDrop (and MediaDrop 0.10.3)

Posted:
by Felix Schwarz

Moving forward, we have decided to rename the MediaCore Community Edition to "MediaDrop". This is primarily to separate it a bit more from the MediaCore.com cloud platform I have to say that it was a nice journey so far but now we reached a point where the old name "MediaCore CE" became a major source of confusion for customers and open source enthusiasts alike.

Why?

As you probably know MediaCore Inc. runs the MediaCore.com cloud platform. In 2011 that platform started as a fork of the open source version "MediaCore" but since the to versions diverged quite a bit. The cloud platform got a new layout, many features and big focus on educational institutions. The community edition added their own access restriction features, and improved testability and pluggability a lot.

However a lot of customers were confused by the name similarity. There were many inquiries to mediacore.com about self-hosting and questions on the open source form about cloud features. Therefore we (MediaCore Inc. + me) decided that it was time to change "MediaCore CE" into something different. And last but not least there is a bit of a trademark issue: MediaCore Inc. always had to keep some control over the open source project (through hosting it on their servers) to prevent any potential trademark dilution.

So from now on MediaCore CE is MediaDrop.

We won't alter the old releases but MediaCore CE MediaDrop 0.11 will be the first release with the new name everywhere. This change also opens a lot of new possibilities for the open source version: With a completely independent name we can run the hosting on own servers and get more control into the hands of the community.

Thank you SimpleStation MediaCore Inc.

I would also like to use the oppurtunity to thank MediaCore Inc. for open sourcing the software in 2010 and their open source work afterwards. Also I think they handled the transition to a community maintained software pretty well.

Technical Implications for Developers and Operators

Unfortunately the name has some implications on developers. If you deployed MediaCore MediaDrop from git you should be aware that the repository was moved to a new location: http://github.com:mediadrop/mediadrop

If you cloned the MediaCore repository directly you need to tell git where the latest source code is:

git remote rm origin
git remote add origin git@github.com:mediadrop/mediadrop.git
git fetch origin
git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/master master
# if you also use the "v0.10-stable" branch you need to do this as well:
# git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/v0.10-stable v0.10-stable

If you have your own fork on github you don't have to do anything. However I also released MediaDrop 0.10.3 which has updated names and more importantly knows about the new download urls.

Another implication is that the Python package names will change from "mediacore" to "mediadrop". Unfortunately this means all plugins must be changed (and will be incompatible to MediaDrop 0.10 afterwards). Maybe I can create a compatibility package to prevent that kind of problems but no promises here. The rename will happen in a few weeks.

Also the mailing lists were renamed so the urls and email addresses changed: