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Pterodactyl panel has been receiving fewer and fewer updates from the main maintainer Matthew in recent months, also new additions from the community were not allowed. Therefore, on April 12 came the message that many people were waiting for. All group of Pterodactyl team stops maintaining Pterodactyl and start a new beginning with Pelican Panel.
It is important to understand what the pain points were with Pterodactyl. First of all, Pterodactyl was getting less and less maintained, Matthew, the main maintainer of Pterodactyl, was no longer accepting new pull requests, and was only doing security updates, which caused a lot of frustration for many people on the Pterodactyl community. Which resulted in ever further postponement of the long-announced Pterodactyl v2.
In addition, compatibility with third party software was poor. Many Pterodactyl addon & theme developers had their own way of integrating their work into Pterodactyl. This sometimes caused conflicts between different mods. Because of this, the Blueprint.zip framework was introduced, but not yet ready for production so far.
This, combined with other problems such as an difficult deployment and other minor issues, was the reason to make a fresh start with Pelican Panel. With a vision to build on the solid foundation of what Pterodactyl now is, while the Pelican Panel team explores new horizons and introduces features that they believe will greatly benefit the community.
Exciting new feature
The Pelican Panel team is announcing a lot of exciting new features, here are some of the features they mentioned in their announcement:
- Plugin system: One of the most exciting new feature is the plugin system. With this system you can easily create, edit and manage addons and themes on your Pelican Panel.
- Streamlined installation: A vastly improved installation process relative to the old Pterodactyl Panel.
- Improved code: Improving and simplifying the code base to encourage open source contributions by removing the learning curve.
- Central Hub: A central location to find trusted plugins, services (eggs) and themes for Pelican Panel.
In addition, the transition from Pterodactyl Panel to Pelican Panel will be flawless, according to the Pelican Panel team. In addition, they will continue to work on the eggs, their website states the following about the eggs "Yes! We have a newer version of them planned, but the original ones will always work". In addition, many other features of Pterodactyl will remain the same in Pelican Panel, for example, the API, billing solutions or the wings will continue to work as they do now.
New license
Although Pelican Panel is open source, it has a new license, it is no longer MIT licensed, but AGPL-3, and this has caused a controversy. To understand why this controversy arose, it is important to understand the difference between MIT and AGPL-3 licenses. The AGPL does not allow companies to use the licensed code in a modified state unless they release the source code of their application, which means if you modify the source code of Pelican panel, you have to release it as open source. The MIT license allows companies to use the licensed code in a modified state without having to publish the source code.
If you want to modify the original Pelican Panel source code, but also want to keep it private, you can either only use it non-commercially, or you have to sponsor the project for $500 a month, which is $6,000 a yearly.
What makes Pterodactyl so great is that there are a lot of addons and themes, but this license takes away a lot of motivation for developers to create new resources. And the Pelican Panel team also understood this, so the AGPL-3 license applies unless you use the plugin system, in which case you can keep the resource private and license it the way you want, a genius move by the Pelican Panel!
Our predictions
Of course, a new project creates many uncertainties. But here's what we think:
- First of all, we think it will take some time before the first hosting companies will use Pelican Panel in production. This is with any new software, but also because Pterodactyl is doing the work for now. Also, a big reason people will not switch immediately is because there are no addons or themes available yet, and it will probably take a while until they are.
- Which brings us right to the next thing, despite working with a brand new system, we think there will be some developers transferring their addons or themes from Pterodactyl to Pelican Panel. However, you will probably have to buy the resource again for Pelican Panel.
Conclusion
The Pelican Panel is an exciting new start for the Pterodactyl community, with the promised new features which will change the entire game panel industry. It will probably take some time before it takes off, but with the original core developers of Pterodactyl, be believe it will even be bigger than Pterodactyl itself!
