Hi folks, thanks so much for all of your thoughtful commentary here! I have passed all of your feedback on to the Product team.
What I can share is that you can absolutely count on us to not remove the CMS from github or change the license to prevent any sort of usage. You can continue to fork the CMS to make any changes that you need.
I am sorry that I do not have further updates!
It’s very good news,
Thanks for work
@mosesoak @mfan What limitations have you found with Netlify CMS and Gatsby v4? We’re using Netlify CMS on a large Gatsby v4.17.1 site and haven’t come across any issues yet.
I am seconding this comment.
I just finished adding Netlify CMS to several of my repos and I was having an issue and I came across this thread and now I am quite sad. I really love Netlify and Netlify CMS. I really hope that Netlify CMS comes back into active developer. As an amateur I was drawn away from WordPress and to JAMSTACK’s speed and stability but I’ve found mostly heartache.
Thank you @hillary for the update!
One related question arises:
Netlify CMS relies on Netlify Identity and Netlify’s Git Gateway, which are not open-source / out of the scope of a community-maintained fork of Netlify CMS.
Can we rely on Netlify (the company) to keep these doors open?
(To be clear, I’m also thinking here of the pricing, as I’m using Netlify CMS for open-source projects and non-profit organizations)
Yes, both of those services would be available at least for a long time. There are no intentions to disable Identity and Git Gateway.
I originally began implementing Netlify CMS + Netlify on client projects because, with such an active community and so many contributors, it seemed to be the least likely solution to fail in the future. Never imagined this could happen to such an important part of web infrastructure (and so shining an example of the power of open source) with no comparable replacement available. Is it just me or does it seem like only a serious crisis of leadership/management at Netlify could have led to such an important project being abandoned?
It feels that way re: management/leadership crisis. Suddenly such a useful product has zero maintainers? Just odd. There are some kinks in it and definitely some tech debt by the looks of the code, but I’d hardly call it something worth stopping all development on. As you said, there are real customers using it at this point. It has great value.
At the very least, Netlify could monetize it with a subscription model. I’d pay $10/mo if that’s what it took.
I am looking forward to the fork of the project on November 30th
With hopefully a great participation of those who are waiting for their PR to be validated since all this time
Hello @McFly and @geotrev! 
Welcome to the forums! 
I appreciate the feedback you have provided on this topic. We have raised this discussion with product and look forward to providing an update soon.
Hi @SamO thank you for the update and raising this discussion with product. Any updates you can share so far? NetlifyCMS is truly loved by clients because of its simplicity and live previews. Best from Amsterdam
so forestry.io is getting sunset so that’s out. I set one of my clients up on Netlify CMS for their Jekyll site. I wanted to check if this CMS would suffer a similar fate under the erratic sways of JAMstack development and here we are 
@Roneo.org that’s an excellent question. I’m shopping for a CMS for my Jekyll builds I did for a bunch of non-profits. I built a site with Netlify CMS after forestry announced their end of life but I really want to be sure I’m setting people for success.
Hey folks,
We have already promised, in this thread (here: Is this project dead? - #44 by hillary) that we will not remove the code from GitHub nor change its license in a way to limit its use.
We have also already promised, also in this thread (here: Is this project dead? - #50 by hrishikesh) that we intend to keep the auxiliary services to allow you to continue to use our CMS (or others) on our service running for the foreseeable future.
Finally, we are aware and excited that community members have forked the CMS (see https://staticjscms.netlify.app/ for more details), and begun development on it once again, as you can tell from looking at the codebase for our CMS that maintenance is basically at a standstill: Commits · netlify/netlify-cms · GitHub
While Netlify is still considering the future of the codebase, and someone above my pay grade will come announce our future intentions someday in this thread (once they are decided), I think you can read between those lines that your best bet today would likely be to use the fork. This of course will come with the expectations of support that come with a package maintained by a third party with whom you have no financial relationship, so you have to decide if that works well for your business or not.
can you at least indicate in the readme that currently nobody is maintaining the project (and maybe even point to the fork)?
Ready for merge @fool : Update README.md with notice that this repository maintenance has been halted. by talves · Pull Request #6647 · netlify/netlify-cms · GitHub
I don’t have high enough permission to overwrite the merge block.
Hey all thanks for your patiences on this our dev team is looking into this request. (:
I want to note - anyone considering using the staticccms fork should read this comment and the thread surrounding it: Create NetlifyCMS to StaticCMS Migration Guide · Issue #46 · StaticJsCMS/static-cms · GitHub
My two cents: the fork is a fantastic and commendable effort, but it’s a complete rewrite, removes a huge number of features, will never even attempt be kept in sync with the original, and most important of all - is made by a solo developer without many other OSS projects that I’m aware of, with no financial backing, for a church website. It would be a big risk for most teams to rely on it for a production use case.
If all of that is fine for your use case, then go ahead. But the Netlify team shouldn’t point to it on their repo. It’s not a like for like replacement and an official mention would give the wrong impression that it’s safe for production use.
Sorry to be late to reply but I’m happy to lay out the main pain points for you and others. I realize that the answer to the thread topic “is it dead?” has been answered Yes so I’m no longer looking for support, just sharing for the sake of it.
Upgrading Gatsby to 4 is blocked by a problem with static pathing in their sourcing plugins, never solved Graph fails to query images · Issue #36432 · gatsbyjs/gatsby · GitHub
As @mfan noted, the way Netlify now requires GitHub contributor seats led to unforeseen monthly costs
We also had to solve one MAJOR technical lack of NetlifyCMS: graphql type generation. We rolled our own custom script that parses the YAML and generates typings that Gatsby can use for its graph. Without this, you can still use the CMS but in a large project with a complex schema you’ll need to automate it at some point. Whoever is writing that Static CMS hopefully has realized this and addressed it for Gatsby.
On the bright side all the CMS ever did to our codebase was add a bunch of static markdown files and static assets. So simply discontinuing use of it in the future won’t break the code, it will just eliminate the CMS admin frontend. But that’s preferable to something like Contentful where the entire codebase ends up wrapped around their specific data format. Porting to another CMS in the future is still feasible.
Sorry to see this project put on ice, we really liked it!
@creativiii @teamcrisis thanks for the suggestion, this seems like a helpful strating point for people in this thread Netlify CMS Migration Guide - Static CMS.