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by kichuku 3654 days ago
The head of mRemoteNG has posted in the forums[1] in Jan 2016 asking advise on whether he should declare the project dead.

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mRemoteNG has not been in active development for quite some time now. After I lost my job, I had hoped I could make a living maintaining mRemoteNG. However, user contributions and website advertising revenue turned out not to be enough to make that possible and the open source license means there are not many other options for monetization.

It's time that I either hand the reigns over to someone else or declare the project dead. I feel bad for not doing so sooner.

If I let someone else take over, the question is, how do I find such a person, and how do I make sure they are the right person? It's a lot of work for very little reward. In addition to writing code, you need to triage bug reports in JIRA, reply to emails, reply to forum posts, keep the forum spam free, and countless other things. For mRemoteNG to thrive, you will need help and finding and coordinating those helpers is a lot of work in itself.

The big question though is, is it worth it? The architecture of mRemoteNG is old and fragile. I made many bug fixes, improvements, and refactored a lot but there's still a ton that needs to be improved. Nearly every seemingly simple bug report or feature request ends up being a huge can of worms due to deep architectural issues or third party dependencies.

So, what are everyone's thoughts? Do I declare the project dead or find someone to continue it? People have offered to help but how do I make sure they're trustworthy? How do I make sure I don't just hand mRemoteNG over to someone who will just steal all of your passwords or something?

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Felix, the original author of mRemote had replied[2] in that thread in March 2016 offering to help

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Hi there,

I'm Felix, the original author of mRemote which I initially started in 2007. I've previously worked with rmcardle to transition the project to him since I joined ASG (visionapp back then) to improve ASG Remote Desktop. A few years back I then joined the Royal Applications team to try something new - build a remote connections manager for the Mac. Since then it's been 4 years that I'm happily building and improving Royal TSX (for OS X): https://www.royalapplications.com/ts/osx/features

Since I'm still developing a competing commercial product and due to my past relationship with mRemote, I've monitored mRemoteNG development quite closely. Furthermore, I've seen references to "Owner of the original mRemote", "Original mRemote author", etc. so I wanted to chime in on the discussion and generally offer myself as being available for questions or inquiries of all kinds.

So, if you need anything, just PM me or reply to this thread.

cheers, felix

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[1] - http://forum.mremoteng.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3137#p6165

[2] - http://forum.mremoteng.org/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3137&start=20...