Re: [protege-user] Protégé not longer maintain ?

On 21 Aug 2025, at 09:23, Luis Enrique Ramos García via protege-user <[email protected]> wrote:
> When was it announced that protégé would not be maintained any more?.

Speaking as the de facto maintainer of Protégé, this comes as a surprise to me. :D 

The only announcement I am aware of is the one made by Matthew Horridge when Protégé 5.6.0 was released in February 2023 [1], in which he explained that Protégé Desktop was no longer maintained *by Stanford University* but was now a “community-maintained” project.

I don’t know if that is the source that allows the author of this blog post to claim that Protégé is “no longer being maintained“, but if so, that’s a serious misunderstanding.

“Community-maintained” does *not* mean “no longer maintained”, and pretending that it does is, quite frankly, insulting to all the free software developers who maintain community-led projects (including many of some of the most critical pieces of our modern infrastructure).

“Community-maintained” means that the project will be maintained as long as there is at least one person in the community motivated to maintain it. For now, that person is me, along with a couple of other persons (e.g. Yevgeny Kazakov). And I do intend to keep maintaining Protégé for the foreseeable future.

Now, one possible source of confusion is that, since I am not affiliated with Stanford University in any way, I have no control whatsoever over the Protégé website on protege.stanford.edu <http://protege.stanford.edu/>. Initially, there was a mechanism in place that allowed me to at least update the download links to point to the latest release, but that mechanism has been broken in the past few months for some reason. This is why the protege.stanford.edu <http://protege.stanford.edu/> website still says that the latest release of Protégé Desktop is Protégé 5.6.5 (released last October), even though I had since then released Protégé 5.6.6 back in May and Protégé 5.6.7 two weeks ago.

Until/unless Stanford gives me back a working mechanism to update the official Protégé website, anyone looking to download the latest version of Protégé should head to the releases page of the GitHub repository [2].


> Is there protégé reaching his EOL?.

*Not* for as long as I have anything to say about it.


> Or are the claims of this author wrong?. 

The claim about Protégé no longer being maintained is definitely wrong. And I can’t help but feel that this is not, in fact, a “misunderstanding” of the aforementioned announcement about Protégé being handed over to the community, but a deliberate lie aimed at bolstering the other claims about OWL being ”phased out”.

Best,

- Damien, your Protégé maintainer


[1] https://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/protege-user/2023-February/013447.html

[2] https://github.com/protegeproject/protege-distribution/releases/tag/protege-5.6.7


-- 
Damien Goutte-Gattat, PhD   Department of Physiology,
                            Development and Neuroscience
[email protected]             Downing Street
+44 7954 894097             Cambridge CB2 3DY

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