FreeRDP community,
I have some exciting news for you, which you can easily guess from the title
of this announcement. It is a common thing within the industry to use major
revision numbers for major releases, and FreeRDP is no exception to that
rule. In our case, 1.0 will be a rewrite of FreeRDP using a bottom-up
approach, accepting only Apache contributions from day 1. This means that we
are rewriting some of the most major FreeRDP components like
libfreerdp-core, but it is a good thing: we’re taking this as an opportunity
for making all the changes we wanted to do for a while, and using a much
better design than the original.
Some of you will read this with one thing in mind: what about FreeRDP 0.9
which you announced a couple of months ago? Yes, this is right, and I know
that many of you are eagerly waiting for a release. However, we took the
decision not to release FreeRDP 0.9 in order to focus on FreeRDP 1.0 and get
it released as soon as possible. We give ourselves an estimate of two months
before we can get 1.0 ready. Preparing a release and then maintaining it
takes time from our most talented developers, and we need them to be focused
on FreeRDP 1.0 instead. Do not worry, 1.0 will be worth the wait, you can be
sure of that.
There are some aspects of 1.0 that need to be unambiguous to everyone.
First, it is a *rewrite*, meaning it is not a fork of FreeRDP itself, and it
is not a fork of rdesktop. If the FreeRDP 0.x series were a fork of
rdesktop, it won’t be the case of the FreeRDP 1.x series. License-wise, here
is how you can make the distinction:
FreeRDP 0.x series: GPLv2 (rdesktop fork)
FreeRDP 1.x series: Apache (pure FreeRDP)
We are inviting everyone interested in helping the FreeRDP 1.0 effort to
make themselves known. Work has already been started, we are literally
working 24/7 on this. The FreeRDP 1.0 development repository can be found
here, but it is not functional yet, even though we are unit testing
everything to ensure it is correct as we progress:
https://github.com/FreeRDP/FreeRDP-1.0
We would like to make this effort as open and transparent as possible, so
interested contributors should use the mailing list instead of sending
private emails, or alternatively make use of our IRC channel. Since the
re-announcement of the IRC channel, people are often in there, including me
and the other core developers. As a reminder, our IRC channel is #freerdp @
irc.freenode.net
We do need to apply some strict rules though. All FreeRDP 1.0 contributors
will need to accept a contributor agreement in which they state that code
they contribute is theirs, and that it is also properly licensed under the
Apache license. In addition to this, we are also code reviewing
contributions before they are added to the repository.
The FreeRDP 1.0 rewrite will be done under the governance of the Open Thin
Client Alliance, who has helped us tremendously throughout the latest
challenges we faced. The OTCA is based in Germany, and provided us with an
excellent lawyer who reviewed and validated the strategy that was just
described. If you are a company with interests in FreeRDP, you are invited
to contact the OTCA in order to become a member, or just to get to know more
about what it is. Without the support from the OTCA, I doubt we would have
been able to get all the resources necessary to undertake such a rewrite.
To conclude, I would like to thank everyone for their well appreciated
support. FreeRDP is not a one-man show, it is the result of a community
effort, which makes us strong. Thanks to our developers, to the companies
backing FreeRDP, and to our user base that keeps sending us words of
encouragement.
Best regards,
- Marc-Andre
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