RoundCube-Next Is Woefully Behind Schedule

Written by Michael Larabel in Free Software on 11 September 2016 at 09:21 AM EDT. 14 Comments
FREE SOFTWARE
After raising more than $103,000 USD last year via crowd-funding the RoundCube-Next web-based email client doesn't really appear to be going anywhere.

A massive crowdfunding campaign was launched in early 2015 to make RoundCube-Next a reality where they raised $103,541 of their original $80k goal. RoundCube-Next is/was supposed to be completely redesigned, offer integrated chat functionality, support video conferencing with WebRTC, integrate cloud file access, and offer a new and quite nice looking responsive UI.

Even though they exceeded their crowdfunding goal, there hasn't been much activity to report on with this project in months. Various participants to the crowdfunding campaign have provided "news tips" over the summer and have finally been seeing enough complaints to write about it today. Complaints have also been going into Reddit, the project's own forums, as well as comments on the campaign. Reportedly even the perks like stickers or t-shirts from the crowdfunding haven't been fulfilled.

The RoundCube-Next Git repositories also provide no confidence. The new RoundCube-Shell has seen only 57 commits with it being largely authored by one individual and only seeing one or two commits every couple of months. RoundCube-Server has seen just 22 commits, again very rarely, the mail client itself is at 20 commits and hasn't seen a commit since June. The original Roundcube Git repository appears much more active than the original -next work.

The most recent update to the IndieGoGo campaign was four months ago saying that there have been non-technical issues dragging down the communication and development, including staffing issues for developers to work on the project. Thomas Bruederli wrote, "There have been some personnel changes and the Roundcube Next team temporarily suffers from understaffing. Anyway, in the mean time we have established a detailed project plan for the first milestones but chose to wait with announcing it until we can add a concrete timeline to it. This now depends on how fast we'll get the development team back together and can reliably sum up the efforts for the individual project steps." Again, that was four months ago as their most recent update after raising $100k on this web-based mail client.

Well, don't hold your breath waiting on RoundCube-Next... If I happen to hear anything more, will post it.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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