[Pan-users] Re: no further development ?

[Duncan]

Stefan Onken posted <address@hidden>, excerpted
below,  on Mon, 24 May 2004 20:35:11 +0100:

> I am just wondering that since late January (for now almost 4 month) no
> new Pan version has been released ! Is the Pan development still in
> progress ?

Charles is the main developer.  He stated late last year that he was quite
busy in meatspace and that he wasn't finding a lot of time to work on PAN.

That was after 0.14.2 stable was released.  It was a long time after that,
3-4 times the normal time between betas, it seemed, before the first
0.14.3 beta (0.14.2.90) came out.  There's been one beta since, the
0.14.2.91 beta that's current, but it too took longer than it used to. 

I've no idea if/when he'll have more time again.  To some extent, I
believe this is due to the economy.  After the internet bubble burst,
there were a lot of unemployed geeks around, and open source benefited
tremendously from the time they had to give.  Those that weren't
unemployed, consultants and employees of tech companies that managed to
survive, also had less to do, and more time to spend on open source, to
the benefit of the entire community, of course. (I'm not sure, but I
believe Charles was likely in this group.. not unemployed, but less
business than he'd like, thus, more time to spend on PAN.)  Now, the
economy has picked up, and all that slack time that folks were putting
into open source has disappeared.  More folks are making $$ again, but
projects that aren't of enough interest to a company to get sponsored,
aren't getting as much work done on them any more.

Charles mentioned at one point that he has a paypal donations button up on
the PAN site, but that he'd gotten less than $100 (IIRC) off of it, total.
He wasn't strong-arming folks into donating, merely being realistic about
where his $$ were coming from.  As long as that's the case, PAN is going
to be something he does in his spare time, and with the economy doing what
it's doing now, and as good quality a work as he has demonstrated with
PAN, I'm sure he's got more paying work coming in than he can do, and
there simply isn't a lot of time left for PAN, any more.  I can't blame
him.

You wouldn't happen to be a rich guy willing to sponsor him to spend some
PAID development time on PAN, would you?  I'm sure all the rest of us
would thank you for it!  <g>

Of course, another alternative, if you have the required coding abilities,
would be to do some patch submission and/or other project contribution
yourself.  Charles and Chris have historically been quite open to that, as
long as it fits with what is already there, and doesn't break GNKSA
approval or something else they've worked hard to do.  (Thus, don't expect
them to take submissions making it easier to top post, or whatever. <g>) 
PAN does have a CVS checkout available, so you can work with current CVS
sources.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little
temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." --
Benjamin Franklin