[Samuel_Michon]

“Camino is not receiving security updates” “Camino reaches its end” “Camino is no longer being developed”

I don’t like the tone of this press release. They make it seem like they’re not responsible for the lack of updates and that Camino died a natural death. They didn’t offer an explanation nor did they give any advance notice. Not very classy.

[gaius]

From http://caminobrowser.org/blog/2011/#mozembedding

As a purely community-based open source project, no one is employed to work on Camino; all Camino developers are volunteers, working on Camino in their spare time, as a labor of love. While maintaining embedding in a fork of Gecko is theoretically possible, we don’t have the manpower for a sustained effort of that kind

[Samuel_Michon]

Ah, that explains a lot. It also shows the shadow side of open source software development: if the developers get bored, they can just up and leave. If all the devs do so, the project is dead but there’s no one there to call it. Users aren’t owed any explanation.

[ams6110]

And this differs from commercial/closed source software how? Google Reader come to mind, as one example?

[gaius]

In this case, the maintainers of a library they depended on were the ones that upped and left.