Re: About to declare 'unmaintained'

[Joe Shaw <joe joeshaw org>]

Hi,

On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 11:39 AM, guido iodice <guido iodice gmail com> wrote:
> Can Novell leave unmantained a piece of its desktop? This is a suicide for
> Suse.

Exactly what Novell intends to do with Beagle is unclear, but I think
"suicide" is a bit hyperbolic.  From my time at Novell there was a
love/hate relationship with Beagle among SUSE users.  Some people
loved it and wouldn't live without it, and other people despised it to
the point where the very first thing they did after installing SUSE
was remove Beagle.  I think a lot of people would be pretty
disappointed if they stopped shipping Beagle, but would they lose a
lot of business?  I'm not so sure.

I don't have any inside knowledge anymore, but it is conceivable that
SUSE would ship Tracker in a future release and replace a chunk of
Beagle's functionality with that.

> Well, I think there are some stupids men in Novell (did someone say
> "Miguel"?), but I hope not so stupid.
> Monotouch can't be Novell core business....

Well, Miguel is a friend of mine, so I don't really appreciate that.

Novell's a big company, and Mono is a totally separate entity from
their desktop business.  If Novell wants to put resources toward
Beagle, it's going to come from the SUSE organization and not Miguel's
Mono organization.

I agree with you, though, in that I am not really sure what Novell's
aims are with Monotouch, but that's orthogonal to this.

Joe