Tizen's Dawati Shell Has Gone Dormant

Dawati was an interesting desktop shell for the Tizen operating system that was pulled from the MeeGo project, but work on the project has more or less been halted for the past six months.

Tizen is still around with the Tizen 2.0 Alpha from September that's expected to be officially released in December, but the Dawati Shell hasn't seen real activity since April of this year.

It was brought up on Twitter about the "death" of Dawati. The Dawati.org domain doesn't resolve and if looking at the GitHub for the dawati-shell the last commit was six months ago. The Dawati artwork repository hasn't been touched in nine months.

For a while the Dawati Shell was being developed by Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers and it was nice since the MeeGo UI was interesting and Dawati was using a hybrid XWayland environment. But now Dawati isn't being touched.

I haven't been able to find any official information why work on Dawati hasn't really happened in more than six months, but likely the Intel developers working on it have since been re-tasked with other higher-priority Tizen / open-source work.

One of the Intel developers previously working on Dawati was Lionel Landwerlin, who now appears to be mostly doing Clutter/Android work. Another one was Michael Leibowitz, who is working on the automotive side of Tizen. The only bit of Dawati work that appears active is dawati-user-testing that is being done by Michael Wood of Intel.

It was also last month that an Intel Linux developer accused Samsung of clobbering others with Tizen.