Now that Michael Gerasimov, one of the last remaining Omea developers at JetBrains, has gone public on the jetbrains.omea.pro newsgroup with the state of affairs at JetBrains concerning Omea, I can comment here.

While JetBrains may receive more revenue and recognition from its IntelliJ IDEA product (e.g. leading edge refactoring support in a Java IDE), Omea represents a compelling and leading offering in the personal information management space. I certainly hope that Omea continues to thrive long from now in one way or another. Thoughts of an open source Omea project are particularly exciting, but I’d be just as happy for JetBrains to decide to maintain it as a viable commercial offering.

My worst fear is that Omea may simply die–be quietly taken offline and become forgotten…nothing more than archived code, binaries and docs…thoughts of what could have been.

There is certainly software deserving of such a fate, but Omea is not among it. Not by a long shot!

Update 3/15/2008: My fears have been relieved.