Hi Jorge, 2007/3/31, Jorge Arellano Cid <jcid@dillo.org>:
Guys, please allow me to say that these comments hurt...
I do sincerely appreciate the interest that you show in Dillo; to me it means you understand the concept of it and have hopes in the project evolving to its vision.
Me too. I dedicated seven years of my life to developing Dillo full time. Living on donations, in poor neighborhoods, rejecting high salaries, and trying to explain my (non-technical) family I was not crazy for doing it. All this time the code has been open and GPLd. Anyone could have done the same I did for the project.
Sebastian made a huge effort too. Having a job and developing a web browser is a very demanding task, and he did even more than that. I highly respect the man.
In Germany we decided with him to keep the Dillo FLTK2 closed until we both agreed to release. This was mainly because a company was to hire us to develop it and declined on the last minute.
I once asked in this list how many developers were willing to work on Dillo FLTK2 if released. One answer still stands.
From some time ago I think it would be good to release the new code. I have emailed several times with no answer.
Finally, I currently fail to see I'm the problem, but it could be. No person saying otherwise is a strong sign.
I appreciate your dedication to Dillo, you was (are) a good father to this project. As all father you want to protect your child and have fear the way it can follow. But Dillo need to evolve to support features only existents in modern browsers as i18n, javascript, https, tabs, flash (gnash), etc. I know you always had fear that Dillo become very fat and run away from the original intention of project. But maybe you can found a way to balance between these 2 variables (features / size and/or speed), maybe a modular system (using the Dillo plugin system for example). Keeping the source code closed you will not get developers and day after day this code base will become deprecated and don't will get new features. This is the evolution theory of Darwin, if it don't evolve it will die and will be replaced by other (Minimo?, NetSurf?, other). Please Jorge think about this. Now that Linux is become the mainstream on smart phone market, Dillo can get a break (get a chance), but keeping it closed source (on closed curtains) will be more difficult to company see the Dillo potential.
-- Sincerely Jorge.-
Best regards, Alan