In the decade since the first version of Arachnida was first released, the industrial embedded software market has evolved to the point where it no longer makes sense for Vlinder Software to recommend using Arachnida for new projects and products: there are many alternatives available on the market that we have found make more sense in the projects we’ve encountered in the last few years. Having come to this conclusion, we first analyzed whether there were any significant changes were could make to Arachnida to make it more relevant to today’s market. The market now includes “IoT” devices as well as robust industrial devices that are connected to the internet and to each other. The appearance of IoT devices, in particular, has spurred the development of several alternatives to Arachnida.

At the conclusion of this analysis, and after careful deliberation, we’ve decided to end Arachnida as a product offering.

The component parts that make up most of Arachnida remain under active development and Arachnida will continue to be supported for customers with currently active licenses, as long as those licenses continue to be renewed, but as of today, were will no longer accept purchase orders for new licenses for Arachnida. The last GA version of Arachnida will remain version 2.3.

For current users of Arachnida, we do not recommend changing your implementations because of this: we will continue to maintain the component parts of the framework and will repair any security-related issues for five years after the last licenses expired (which means your maintenance remains secure for as long as you renew your licenses). We will also continue honoring our current commitments and consider change requests and bug fixes as usual.