In 2009, the company behind the OTRS free edition announced to go public as a share company OTRS AG. There was a lot of rumors that the free edition would be discontinued. Luckily it did not happen. However, its popularity meant that it continued to be developed and maintained by a community of volunteers.
The OTRS community edition is a popular ticketing system used by companies and organizations around the world. It is free and open source, and offers a wide range of features. However, its development has been taken over by a new company, OTRS AG which made quickly clear that the direction of the development will change. As a result, the free edition is no longer being developed or maintained since 2020 and the support for community edition was dropped by OTRS AG in favor of doing only business with OTRS (paid) Enterprise edition.
Users who want to continue using OTRS can either switch to the paid enterprise version, or migrate to one of the many forks of the free edition. Forks are created when developers take the code from an open source project and create a new project with their own changes.
The major interesting fork is Znuny, which is a fork maintained by the initial founder of OTRS Martin Edenhofer. A bunch of the initial team of OTRS have moved also to Znuny as a result of the business change on OTRS AG. So the probability to get back the old velocity of the initial idea of OTRS open source is highly probable to be on Znuny Community edition. They have even taken over the community forum.
Despite of Znuny where is also the fork OTOBO, which is much more innovative compared to Znuny, but the team size is sadly very small. Hopefully Znuny team members will also get more innovative, but since the deciders are the old guys the velocity in change rate is typically not very high. We all hope the new culture of Znuny will make the project more modern and will also help to evolve common development and administration standards.
For now if you are still on OTRS you should upgrade to latest OTRS 5 version, if you are not already there and upgrade afterwards to Znuny 6. Check this article on how to migrate from OTRS to Znuny: Upgrade/Migrate trouble-free from OTRS 5 to OTRS/Znuny 6