JSTV Solutions is pleased to announce that Sumario, the best way to handle forms on any website, is now freely available under the GNU Affero General Public License. Its source code, and everything needed to deploy Sumario on Fly.io is available on GitLab.
Tom and Jeff met while in the MBA program at Loyola Marymount University where their ambitions to help businesses streamline their operations with simple and secure software services collided. First Tom and Jeff developed Ledgery, a payroll and tax preparation service for new, small businesses. They followed-up with Sumario shortly afterwards. We believe Sumario was the first of its kind, and we were pleased to see our idea validated by other, similar solutions that came later. However, we never did see the adoption we had hoped for and felt Sumario deserved. Sadly, we eventually shelved Sumario in 2017.
While Tom and Jeff were recently reflecting on the success JSTV Solutions has had and discussing our next steps, the idea of reviving Sumario came up. We think we’ve learned a lot since we first launched Sumario and have a much better chance at making Sumario a commercial success, but at the same time we have other responsibilities now that won’t allow us to spend the time on Sumario we think that requires. With this in mind we decided to open source Sumario.
Like our passion for remote work, our passion for open source software predates its popularity. Tom had already made contributions to Linux, Perl, and the Apache web server before the term open source had been invented. We knew that Sumario wouldn’t help anyone in its current, archived state. This release of Sumario as open source is its most natural evolution to us.
The only updates we’ve made have been to update Sumario’s dependencies, and run it on Fly.io instead of AWS. We believe this really lowers the barrier to others to deploy Sumario on their own, but still provides a simple and performant service. We’ve created a handful of tickets with some changes we think need to be made in the short-term, but we’ve held off on making long-term plans. We’re excited to see a community grow around Sumario, and look forward to see the direction it wants Sumario to take. We hope you’ll join us on this adventure on GitLab. For those who prefer to let someone else deploy Sumario for them, we are happy to once again offer Sumario as an affordable, paid service at https://sumar.io.