An open source project needs active developers and maintainers in order to stay healthy and grow.
Parse is now open source in the sense of "here's a bunch of code we're throwing over the wall on our way out". Presumably (after the 1-year deadline) it's not going to be maintained or further developed by the original Parse team, who are now working for Facebook and will likely be reassigned to other roles.
Who is going to maintain the Parse source after that? A bunch of people that were using Parse specifically because they did not want to write their own backends to begin with?
Yes open source projects do, and Kinto is currently a well supported project at Mozilla. The folks who made Kinto are awesome, and do awesome things at Mozilla, but my personal experience from working at Mozilla is that Mozilla is an awesome steward of open source projects for users. The devtools team is doing a much better job of becoming stewards of tools for developers, but Mozilla has traditionally been less than ideal steward of projects for use by third parties.
It sounds like some of the more valuable aspects of the server (push notifications, dashboard, analytics) weren't open sourced. But the same caveats apply to the client side code.
This is not a feature complete replacement AFAIK. No push , no cloud code , no webhooks , no admin panel , no analytics though I'm sure people will contribute to the project and add some of these features.
EDIT: Hi folks, I was obviously talking about Parse, not Kinto. Kinto seems to have more features than Parse Server for now ! Looks like an awesome replacement.
You are correct that there is no push currently (we are exploring some ways to make it possible) and no admin panel (we are also exploring a lite admin panel), and no analytics (you should just use something like Mixpanel).
For cloud code, it's not true that parse-server doesn't support it - you can write cloud code directly in the node server.
The core functionality is there, and I highly recommend trying out the official Parse open source solution first, as it will be the easiest for most apps that want to migrate.
My understanding was that Parse (the company) has open-sourced an API-compatible re-implementation of their product as an act of kindness towards everyone currently using their system.
I may be way off base here, but there is no indication that this open source release from Parse is in any way a derivative of their commercial product... at this point whichever reimplementation of the Parse API gains the most developer mind share will survive as the winner. (Of course, Parse the company has a lot of inertia behind their own.)
