Looking for new leader for mRemoteNG

[rmcardle]

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?

[Anthropologeezer]

Thank-you for all the work you've done to date.

Could you fork the code, monetize the new fork, and back-port only bug fixes? That's mid to long term payback though.

Another option is to continue on, but delegate responsibilties to a community of volunteers: writing code, triage bug reports in JIRA, reply to emails, reply to forum posts, keep the forum spam free, and countless other things.

"How do I make sure I don't just hand mRemoteNG over to someone who will just steal all of your passwords"
How all the others do it, by community code inspection?

Remind me please of what language(s) mRemoteNG is written?

[rmcardle]

[bkbartje]

Hi,

at first thank you for the hard work.
I assume you have an new job now. Have you thought about in app advertising, for instance show some advertisement on the gray background which is shown while opening mRemoteNG?
or just like a lot of other application do, show a message while starting the application which says you can get rid of this message every time by donating, or you'll see this message every time the application starts.

I would be glad to help out a little bit, I'm a .Net developer with a really busy full time job. So I don't have that much time, but letting this project bleed to that would be a serious waste.

Regards

Bart

[harfo]

Hi,

Thanks for making this awesome timesaving piece of software! I wish I could help further but I have very little knowledge of software development so am probably not a lot of use here. But I would like to point out that in the last two years, I have noticed a lot more people using this tool and I think if you had another shot at monetizing it you may have more success than you did two/three years ago. I think bkbartje has suggested some really good, non-intrusive money makers like a message at startup and I really would love to see this app put back into active development

Thanks,
E.

[vgiuseppe77]

I'm sorry to hear that...
Good luck and thanks for this great software Riley|

[bkbartje]

Hi All,

Because of this project might be dying I have decided to fork the project and start active development.
I have already fixed several bugs and made several changes and made available the first release.
you can download it from here: http://www.dremote.nl/download/
I still have a lot of work to do, make some improvements, make some fixes. add the forum, fill the website, but the first release is ready.
I will go through with the active development and hope to be able to live up to your expectations.
Regards.

Bart

[kturgeon]

[bkbartje]

Hi,
sorry,
it's here
https://github.com/bkbartk/dRemote
I will add a link on the website

[dmsparer]