Hi, On Mon, Nov 27, 2006 at 02:11:18AM +0200, Joonas Saarinen wrote:
Hello,
It has been almost two months of silence on this list and I thought to ask how are you doing? :)
Anything new about the "Campaign to help Dillo survive"? Etc.
This is a very appropiate question. :-) The campaign to help Dillo survive has not attracted new funders, and the donations amount near EUR 250. This clearly doesn't change a bit the project status. People in the embedded market want a small featured browser, but don't want to invest in it. This is: if we develop it they'll use it, but there's not much interest in funding the development. From a business perspective it makes sense. Investing in Dillo to make a full featured embedable web browser of it, is a three years plan (and who knows what the Web will look like in three years). Now if they only need an embedable web browser that evolves into a full-featured one. They could start deploying it in a year. This is a business opportunity indeed, but it depends on a company having a client demanding it; here using Dillo fits the bill. On the technical side, the port to FLTK2 is almost finished, and has been a surprisingly smooth transition, without surprises, going on as planned (except that we planned for some surprises!). OTOH development is progressing at very slow pace because we, the core developers, can't work full time on it, and spare time is scarce. From a community perspective, it's interesting to notice that there's a need for a lightweight web browser (Think of OLPC, firefox's users demands for less features and smaller footprint, help systems, a thin client for web apps., the embedded market: cell phones, PDAs etc). Now, if not enough users are willing to support development with money, the funding may only come from the business area, but business don't invest with regard to users' needs, but with regard to ROI. BTW, another source of funding is governments, but in seven years, not a single email has arrived from that source ;-). There we are. -- Cheers Jorge.-