Omea is open to the community

March 15th, 2008 · 5 Comments · Content management, Omea, Open source

Now that Michael has publicly posted the official news in the Confluence wiki for Omea and in the newsgroups (i.e. coyly here via a three-part post featuring Esperanto and Alice in Wonderland), I want to also draw attention to this important open source event: http://svn.jetbrains.org/omeaopen.

I caught word of this milestone coming via Jeff Loftus. Serge was kind enough to cut Jeff and I in a couple of days early on the SVN link via the Omea multi-user chat room. (Using Miranda to access the MUC was painless).

I see, too, that David and Dmitry have picked up the news.

It took almost ten months since I posted my open letter to the Omea crew, but they have delivered.

Looks like I need to demonstrate “Omea Master” status.

Tags: feed reader·JetBrains·Omea·Open source·PIM

5 responses so far ↓

1 An open source Omea? // Mar 15, 2008 at 6:14 pm

[...] Update 3/15/2008: My fears have been relieved. [...]
2 Open source Omea! // Mar 15, 2008 at 6:17 pm

[...] Update 3/15/2008: Although over a year later, Omea is finally open to the community. [...]
3 An open letter to Jetbrains about Omea // Mar 15, 2008 at 6:21 pm

[...] Update 3/14/2008: JetBrains has finally released Omea under GPL v2, and the community can participate in its ongoing development (!!). More in a separate post… [...]
4 aggieryan // Apr 13, 2008 at 3:05 pm

Hey Craig, any idea as to when 3.0 is going to be released? And is there a community of developers yet?

I, like you, thought that Omea had a great future ahead of it. It seems that it simply needs to be trimmed down in terms of memory usage, and the indexer could certainly use some optimization. All in all, there really is nothing out there as a desktop application that does everything Omea Pro does.

I am considering getting involved with community development on Omea, but it would entail learning C#, which is a language I don’t know. I think C++ is certainly more efficient although I understand it takes longer to develop with C++ than C# with .NET.
5 Craig Randall // Apr 13, 2008 at 3:55 pm

Hi Ryan.

I don’t have any special insight into when a “3.0″ will be released.

To be frank, I don’t yet see what resembles a community around “OmeaOpen” either, although I’m hopeful that one will emerge soon. The SVN code base hasn’t changed at all since it became publicly available (i.e. still revision 3).

Also, the JetBrains devs supporting “OmeaOpen” have voluntarily indicated that a fair bit of work needs to occur against the current sources (e.g. Michael):

Current code state, while more or less prepared for opening, is not in the shape for releasing - some features are not completed, some are not polished, and for some features very basic decision is made and they are in the prototypical phase, where community discussions are required. All that requires stabilization phase which is very untimely now…

There was been a recent discussion on the Omea newsgroups concerning an overhaul to its database and indexing core. I consider this discussion to be very much in progress with no decisions made, yet.

As for learning C# coming from a C++ background, I can tell you that I came to C# via C++ and to .NET via ATL, STL, etc. I think that this background helped me appreciate what C#/.NET bring to the developer and why no language or framework is a panacea (e.g. you tend to trade one set of challenges/concerns for another). There are lots of excellent, free reources online to learn C#, as well as plenty of C# applications with source code that you can dissect to see code in action (e.g. Paint.NET, CSLA.NET, SharpZipLib, etc.).

Regards,

-Craig