So honestly, I was fairly certain that the MediaGoblin project was dead (and I wasn’t the only one), as the news section for the open source media management project hadn’t been updated since 2016.
But on April 7, 2020, Ben Sturfmels posted a “not dead yet” post saying “We’re still here!”
While development on MediaGoblin has slowed over the last few years, work has continued steadily, with significant improvements such as multi-resolution video (Vijeth Aradhya), video subtitles (Saksham) and a bunch of minor improvements and bug-fixes. Like most community-driven free software projects, progress only happens when people show up and make it happen. See below for a list of the wonderful people who have contributed over the last few years. Thank you all very much!
I wish them all the best, but frankly there are a lot more (active) open source projects in this space than there were four years ago, and that long silence highlights one of the big downsides with open source projects–the possibility that tomorrow everyone involved with the project disappears and there are no updates for four years.
And yes, this certainly happens with closed source products as well. But just an example from my personal life–the proprietary service I use to archive all of my photos has been in business for more than 10 years without interruption.
In the same period of time, I’ve used several self-hosted open source photo storage/organization software that were all very popular, and all flamed out after just a few years.