KDE's Kdenlive Video Editor Has Gone Dark

Written by Michael Larabel in KDE on 24 November 2013 at 12:54 PM EST. 47 Comments
KDE
While there's many Kdenlive fans out there for the KDE-focused open-source video editor, it seems new development efforts around the project have ceased.

A Phoronix reader wrote in this morning, "Kdenlive's project leader JBM who always used to let people know if he was going to be away for a couple of days seems to have just disappeared. His last email was in early July and didn't suggest any problems. Commits from anyone have similarly been almost non existent since then also. I'm forwarding this to you because Kdelive is my favorite Linux video editor. If the leadership and commits are gone, then I'm really hoping some publicity of that will encourage someone to fork or pick up the project and keep it going. The worst thing that could happen would be that no one is every aware that there's a problem, but that there's just never a new release again as people drift away."

This does indeed appear to be the case. The last blog post by Kdenlive's leader, Jean-Baptiste Mardelle, was in early July and about merging the Kdenlive forums with the KDE forums. The Kdenlive Git repository hasn't seen any new commits (aside from the automated l10n daemon script) since early July. I also haven't been able to find any Kdenlive news or status about Jean-Baptiste Mardelle elsewhere.

Others have asked within the KDE Forums recently whether Kdenlive development is over, only to have the only response being from a user saying, "no one answers, you might think that the development is finished." Judging by the Kdenlive forum activity, there's still certainly many users out there but it doesn't appear that there's any new code activity or any overall direction of the project with no communication from Jean-Baptiste Mardelle.

On the Kdenlive developers' mailing list, users and other stakeholders have also been wondering what's up. There's been no communication from Jean-Baptiste and one of the mailing list threads created one month ago still doesn't have any actual answer what's going on with the project.
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