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Announcing Changes to the Open Source RabbitMQ Release and Community Support Policy

· 2 min read
Michael Klishin
Michael Klishin

Effective June 1st, the RabbitMQ community support and release policies will change for the open source distributions of RabbitMQ. The goal of these changes is to ensure that the RabbitMQ team has time to focus on developing new features for the Open Source and commercial versions of RabbitMQ.

What is Community Support?​

Community support is defined as all questions, root cause analysis requests, issue reports, and other interactions the RabbitMQ core team has with open source RabbitMQ users on GitHub and our community forums.

Community Support Policy Changes​

Effective immediately, a new community support policy is adopted for Open Source distributions of RabbitMQ. The policy seeks to ensure that RabbitMQ remains a sustainable open source project.

Under the new policy, only the following groups of users will receive support directly from the RabbitMQ core team:

Release Policy Changes​

Effective June 1st 2024, the RabbitMQ team will adopt a new release policy for the Open Source distribution. The changes do not impact the current RabbitMQ Open Source License. The RabbitMQ core team will continue developing Open Source RabbitMQ under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 on GitHub.

With the new policy, older Open Source release versions (for example, RabbitMQ 3.12.x and older) will no longer receive patches through community support. Patches for older versions of both the Open Source and Commercial versions will be available to customers that have VMware Tanzu RabbitMQ commercial licenses.

In practical terms this means that once RabbitMQ 4.x is released, all new contributions will eventually ship as part of

  • Open Source RabbitMQ 4.x
  • VMware Tanzu RabbitMQ 4.x

Conclusion​

Users who contribute to the RabbitMQ open source distribution, and/or stay current with the latest RabbitMQ release will still have the ability to collaborate with the RabbitMQ team.

All other users seeking assistance with the RabbitMQ Open Source distribution will be required to obtain commercial licenses for RabbitMQ support or seek RabbitMQ-related help elsewhere.