Our company would not have existed without Screenly OSE. This is where it all began, and we’ve always committed to maintain it at our best capacity.
At inception, Screenly OSE was the first (and only) digital signage tool for the Raspberry Pi. Fast forward ten years, and Screenly OSE is still by far the most popular digital signage project on GitHub. In fact, it is larger than the next three projects combined.
A lot of things have changed over the years. When we first started out, we built Screenly OSE to solve our own needs while running a small digital signage network in Sweden. After receiving a large number of requests for a “managed version” of Screenly, we eventually gave in and started building this. This was launched under the product Screenly Pro. To make matters even more complicated, Screenly OSE was initially called just Screenly, but was renamed Screenly OSE (for Open Source Edition) later when we launched Screenly Pro.
In the early days, Screenly Pro was essentially just Screenly OSE with a central management layer. That all changed when we launched Screenly v2. This version was a full rewrite from scratch, and didn’t share any code base with Screenly OSE.
Yet, the names remained remarkably similar. This understandably confused a lot of our users. We then made an even more silly thing and dropped the ‘Pro’ from Screenly, and our commercial version became just Screenly. In retrospect, this renaming was foolish.
As we are now starting to funnel more resources into Screenly OSE, we feel that now is the time to finally clear up this confusion once and for all.
Going forward, Screenly OSE will be renamed to Anthias
In the near future, we will launch a dedicated website for Anthias, a new logo, along with a new branding.
Why Anthias?
After weeks of discussing names internally, we failed to come up with a name we were all excited about. Then one weekend while visiting a local aquarium, Viktor spotted a fish with a Screenly purple-like color with a yellow back. The name of the fish? Yellowback Anthias.
The name was brought forward to the team, and we quickly decided to go ahead with this name in the last All-Hands.
Why now?
In short, it was overdue. We’ve not always been able to allocate the resources Anthias deserves. There have been times where the project almost wasn’t actively being developed at all. This is about to change.
Nico recently joined us to work full-time on making Anthias even more amazing, and together with our amazing open source community and contributors, we are looking forward to seeing how far we can take open source digital signage.
