Upcoming Versions
At openfunds we consider two general updates in a year as a good compromise between the size of the updates and the flexibility needed to cope with new regulatory requirements. As we have seen an increasing tendency for new fund regulations, not only in Europe but also in many individual countries in and outside Europe, this puts some pressure on openfunds for more releases, so we have recently had the need to provide extra interim releases to cope specifically with regulatory updates (such as v1.29.1 for EPT v2.1). The above chart with its 6 updates shows what we think should be the minimum of planned releases for 2023 to 2025, but more interim releases may be required in this period.
General release v1.31
The following release is also planned to be mixed purpose. The version will likely reflect the outcomes of the currently ongoing Costs and Charges openfunds Working Group. Composition of this version has not yet begun but is planned for September 2023.
Major Release 2.0
One of the planned things that might need a longer notice period is our intention to publish a major release. A major release can be recognized by a big figure change, e.g. from 1.2x to 2.xx.
The main difference between a minor and a major release, however, is the omission of fields that are no longer supported. More information about the version management can be found in the white paper ‘Version Management’. As openfunds follows a field-level versioning approach it is possible to continue to use ‘no longer supported’ (NLS) fields even after they have been declared as NLS and a recommendation for a newer version exists. This approach allows a greater flexibility on implementation dates, but over time leads to a situation where quite a number of NLS fields can be used (and must be maintained) besides their successor field.
For this reason we are planning a major release at the end of Q1/2024. As can be seen on the chart above, decommissioning the no longer supported fields would allow us to reduce the size of the openfunds field set significantly. At the moment these are the NLS fields to be retired in version 2.0, if the major release took place right after the launch of version 1.29.2: