PLCrashReporter Stewardship Moving to Microsoft

September 12, 2019, by Chris Campbell

We're very pleased to announce that the App Center team at Microsoft will be taking on stewardship of PLCrashReporter, the popular open source crash reporting framework made by Plausible Labs Cooperative.

PLCrashReporter was created by (Plausible co-founder and alumnus) Landon Fuller way back in 2008, and it was the first crash reporting solution available for iOS. In the years that followed, many applications and crash reporting services have adopted PLCrashReporter as a critical part of their foundation. In that time, Plausible continued to maintain PLCrashReporter as an open source project, and developed improvements in collaboration with crash reporting services such as HockeyApp (which later became part of Microsoft).

In recent years, our focus has shifted to things unrelated to crash reporting, and it has become more difficult to find time for maintenance of this important project. Meanwhile, the world kept turning, and every so often a change in Apple's platforms would break the build, or require small tweaks, in PLCrashReporter. The App Center team at Microsoft maintained a fork of the main PLCrashReporter repository to help keep their services running smoothly in those times we weren't on hand to fix things upstream.

Given that the App Center team was already very familiar with PLCrashReporter, and that they had expressed interest in contributing their changes upstream, it seemed like a natural fit for Microsoft to take over as stewards of PLCrashReporter. To that end, we talked it over and they have graciously agreed to take on responsibility of the PLCrashReporter repository and related sites. To be clear, the licensing of PLCrashReporter isn't changing, and Microsoft looks forward to working with the community on this open source project.

We feel that Microsoft has been making positive strides in the open source community over the past few years, and we are confident that they'll be great hosts of PLCrashReporter as it enters its second decade of existence. For more on the transition, check out Microsoft's announcement or visit this GitHub issue.