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Cool but abandoned applications

Submitted by Johannes on Tue, 2005-11-01 10:53. Bag of Software

I don't know if it can be proven statistically but I seem to come across an ever increasing number of incredibly useful GNOME based applications which have been abandoned by their former developers, even though there is no viable alternative to them.

Lately I found that at least three apps which have found to be stable, useful and without alternative in the GNOME environment have been either officially abandoned or are slowly fading into oblivion. I wonder if places like gnomefiles.org could be instrumental in helping to find new parents for those poor orphans.

Those applications include

Planner This project management application formerly known as MrProject has been officially orphaned by its lead developer Richard Hult on 30. August 2005. So far, no takers have shown up. Planner has been on my GNOME desktop ever since the days of GNOME 1.4. It is an excellent tool to visualize and manage moderately complex projects. Functionality is still not complete. But what exists has proven extremely stable and reliable to me. To my knowledge, no other Gtk/GNOME based project management application is either avaible nor being developed to date.
GParted is closest Free software has ever gotten to produce a replacement for tools such as Partition Magic or Acronis Disk Director. Based on libparted, it is far more than a graphical version of GNU parted. It seemslessly integrates a number of command line tools, enabling it to manipulate, shrink, create or move many different file systems, including even the infamous NTFS. (A complete feature list is here: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/features.php)
At the same time, GParted strongly adheres to GNOME's fundamendal principles of simplicity, cleanliness and elegance.

Following release 0.0.8 on 22 Dec 2004, development has been stalled due to time constraints as the news page explains. He has not declared the project abandoned, but still, almost a year of silence speaks for itself.
PAN - the only unix newsreader ever to get a perfect score on the Good Net-Keeping Seal of Approval evaluations has seen its latest stable release in August 2003. Whoever wanted a really cool newsreader but had no intention to tame the beast known as gnus was very likely to use pan.
Captive Although this is not exactly a GNOME application, it uses a Gtk based installer and is in many ways unique. Captive is to date the only solution enabling full NTFS write support in linux without having to pay USD 69 to Paragon for their commercial NTFS for Linux product. Captive uses the original driver ntfs.sys from MS Windows XP, runs them in an environment based on components of the free Windows NT clone ReactOS and a modified version of LUFS (Linux userland file system).
In October 2004, Jan Kratochvil officially announced the end of his support and development for the package. Since then, no adopter has turned up. Captive was included into Live distributions such as Knoppix to provide full NTFS write support, filling a gap which has been open since at least 1995. Still, no developer has undertaken the changes required to use Captive with Kernels newer than 2.6.8 and ntfs.sys drivers newer than Windows XP service pack 1.

These four apps are currently all in a state of limbo, even though they are mature, stable and usable - and without viable alternative. Loosing them would be a pity for any GNOME desktop. What can be done to save them? Maybe the GNOME community should develop a mechanism similar to what exists in the Debian project: Work needing and prospective packages is a corner on the Debian web site containing listings of packages which have been orphaned by their former maintainers or for which the current maintainers request a new adopter. Anyone with the necessary skills can pick a particular package from this list and adopt it in order to prevent it from being dropped from the distribution. Maybe, gnomefiles.org could be used to serve a similar purpose. It should be extended by a section named "Orphaned applications" (or something else, which sounds cooler) where developers, weary of their job could request adopters instead of silently letting their wonderful work become obsolete. Sure, I have no idea if this will really make a difference, but it is probably worth trying.