Hi, I just wanted to reiterate what Bera said. Unfortunately it's been a long time coming, and I had the revelation fairly recently that our meager maintenance efforts were simply not going to keep up with the positive forward progress of other projects upon which we depend, like Evolution.
Adam asked about bounties. There doesn't appear to be any official bounties system, although some are posted informally here: http://live.gnome.org/Bounties But there doesn't appear to be a comprehensive system similar to Elance. A couple people mentioned whether Novell or Canonical (Ubuntu) would fund Beagle development. I used to work at Novell, and I had the great fortune of working on Beagle pretty much from the start. For a couple of years there they paid two full time developers to work on the project: Jon Trowbridge and myself. When Jon left the company, it was just me -- although there was occasional part-time help, like Dan Winship's excellent work on the search UI. Since I left Novell nearly two years ago, there has been none. I think it's safe to say that Novell no longer has any dedication to the project. I don't mean that as a dig -- having worked on Ximian and SUSE distributions you have to make strategic and tactical decisions where to put your resources, since you can't hack full time on everything. It appears clear that desktop search hasn't panned out as they thought and that experimental projects like Dashboard, Association Browser, etc. aren't feasible. As for Canonical and Ubuntu, a number of releases ago that community decided to go with Tracker instead of Beagle, I believe in part due to a major backlash against Mono following the Microsoft/Novell patent agreement. Although I think Beagle is still for the moment ahead of Tracker in terms of core user functionality, Tracker has a vibrant development community backed by open source companies whereas Beagle's is completely stagnant and bordering on nonexistent. If I were an impartial party trying to decide in which to invest development resources, Beagle is simply a tougher case to make. Having said all that, please don't let me stop anyone from making those overtures. Nothing would make me happier than to see the old dog get a new lease on life. :) As Roger said, maybe it can do so with a reimagined focus. Like I said, I've gotten to hack on Beagle from the beginning, which has been five years (!) now. I am very proud of the work I've done personally, and that we've done as a community. I have my regrets too, both technical and non-technical. But I've also moved on with my life and I hack on other stuff now, and I don't personally have much interest in returning to full-time Beagle development. I take great comfort in the fact that we created the first user-centric search system on Linux, and that it is open source software. Thanks, Joe _______________________________________________ Dashboard-hackers mailing list Dashboard-hackers@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/dashboard-hackers