OTRS

((OTRS)) Community Edition and OTRS
Developer(s)	OTRS AG
Initial release	February 14, 2003
Written in	Perl, Javascript
Operating system	Cross-platform
Type	Ticket tracking software
License(s)	Affero General Public License v3
Website	community.otrs.com

OTRS or "Open Ticket Request System"^[3] is a proprietary ticket tracking application (sometimes referred to as a "trouble ticket" or "issue tracking" system) developed by OTRS AG and the OTRS Group. The company originally also offered a free open-source version called "((OTRS)) Community Edition" but discontinued it on January 1, 2021, leaving only its commercial version available. In addition to their software, the OTRS Group also offers users fee-based hosting, implementation support, and operational support services.

Product history

Open source pioneer Martin Edenhofer planted the first seeds of the OSTR project on September 2, 2001 after talking to colleague Sebastian Wormser about the lack of an open source ticket tracking application.^[3] Edenhofer began programming on OSTR two months later, quickly producing a beta version by March 2002.^[4] On February 14, 2003, Edenhofer released the first stable release of OSTR (version 1.0).^[1] Seeing a market for services to his product (then at version 1.1.3) Edenhofer and other developers decided to create a company — OTRS GmbH — in October 2003.^[5]^[4]

August 2005 saw OSTR 2.0 get released, with reportedly more than 12,000 companies and organizations worldwide using the software.^[6]^[7] As the popularity of the software continued to grow, the company transitioned into a new entity OTRS AG in October 2007, eventually becoming a multinational company.^[8]

In early 2018, OTRS AG announced a series of key changes that would affect both its free open-source and business versions, starting with version 7^[9]:

Significant portions of the non-public functionality found in the business product would be integrated into the public OTRS version.
The public (free open-source) OTRS version will be renamed to "((OTRS)) Community Edition" (CE).
New versions of OTRS (which is now the name of the professional/business version) will be made available to paying customer first, "then several years later to the public."
A separate site will be maintained for the CE.
The company will provide bug fixes to the most recent version of the CE, until a new major release of the CE arrives.
Development to OTRS will now be limited to bug fixes of previously released versions via GitHub; adding new features to future versions is only available to paying customers.

This plan appears not to have lasted long, as with version 8, support for version 6 stopped. OTRS AG added: "As of January 1, 2021, ((OTRS)) Community Edition 6 will not receive any further security updates. It is our constant effort to provide first-class solutions. Therefore security as well as a smooth operations are our priority. For this reason, we will not release a new Community Edition until further notice, but we will focus on the continuous development of OTRS." With that, the open-source community edition appears to have been discontinued.