We just received answer from the company we licensed the icons and other artwork for tag2find… Unfortunately they cannot grant us permission to release the icons alongside an open-source version of tag2find.
Unfortunately this means more roadblocks on the way to releasing the open-source version, as we now not only need to get around some libraries we used but also need to replace almost all of the artwork, which adds quite significant additional work. But we won’t give up so easily…
I’m happy to announce that our currently released version 0.10.2.5 received the “100% CLEAN award” granted by Softpedia and is certified free of malware, adware, and viruses (I knew it, but now I can “prove” it :)).
So, I promised I’d try to keep you more informed from now on. Therefore I just want to publish a short note that we are going on with open-sourcing at the moment.
What has been accomplished up to now? Well. First: all websites and domains have been transferred to a server of mine, all is up and running (blog, website, forum).
Second, I started reviewing the code and libraries we used. It looks quite promising that we will be able to publish most of it under an open-source license. I am currently reviewing and investigating how to treat the situation where one cannot release some libraries under open-source but release the rest. I already contacted the FSF, but I hardly suspect they’ll write back because they for sure get lots and lots of such inquires and most of it should be covered by their FAQs and other documentation (remaining one problem: I am not a lawyer…).
Well, there is no easy way to say this for me, so I make it short: the company funding development of tag2find has decided to cease financial support due to reasons not under our control.
So, this one is out, now we need to turn to more positive prospects: While financial support of tag2find development has ceased, we still managed to get all the rights to continue with development in our spare time. We still believe in tag2find and won’t let it down that easily.
So how will we go on from here? The negotiations regarding the financing have taken away most time of the last months, that’s one of the reasons why we are running behind schedule that far. The new situation will not really improve this. We want to personally apologize to all our faithful users who are still bearing with us. Thank you guys for all the motivation you are giving to us via our forum or via e-mail!
At the moment we have to arrange quite a few things, especially the changed financial situation requires us to devote plenty of our time to other projects in order to earn a living and to go on with tag2find development. Thus, development unfortunately will be delayed further, I’m afraid. But I will try to keep you more updated than we did in the last few months via this blog.
A possible nice outcome of this situation might be: we are evaluating our possibility to open-source tag2find! We cannot be certain yet and we have to figure out several licensing issues around this, but we are working on this as well. At the moment we are struggling to figure out if we have the rights to release all of the source-code and/or which license is suitable and can be applied to all our code and all the libraries we are using. Some libraries (especially some Microsoft libraries) prohibits to be released as part of GPL-licensed code, so we have to figure this out thoroughly.
Thanks again for bearing with us and thanks for your ongoing patience!
Many people have requested an API for interacting with tag2find from external sources (in both our forum and via e-mail). We think this is important but we always wanted to do it once we could provide a stable API, one which would not change and break other applications in subsequent releases. Therefore we always pushed the API back until we are able to ship a non-preview version. Well, as people are already interacting with tag2find without the API (see article in our forum for an importer of Picasa labels to tag2find, I’m very impressed!), we became even more aware how important the API is.
Therefore we will change our development plans in two ways: first, we will work to provide an API as soon as possible. Second, we want to make it available for the current 0.10 version, despite our initial plans to provide new features only in the Next Generation. Reason for also providing the API for 0.10 is, that we will go into limited testing of Next Generation within the next few weeks, but it will be available to the public only later on, once we are pleased with quality. But we do want to provide developers sooner with the API, as we see how urgent it is demanded.
We will keep you updated on the API and provide a quick overview of the possibilities for other developers within the next week.
Now, something about the behavior of tag2find’s next generation. Unfortunately, it is still without any voices because it seems like I don’t have it at the moment
Have fun with it…
First of all, thank you all for your patience. Today, we put the first video about tag2find’s next generation on our website. See how it will look like and send us some feedback about it - contact@tag2find.com. At the end of October we will invite the first users for testing.
I am Tine and from now on I will work in the tag2find development team.
Some of you might have already seen photos of me in the tag2find kart race, since I was the winner of the girls race.
After getting a general overview I will support testing and quality assurance and be grateful for every suggestion or bug report!! Don’t hesitate and write me at contact@tag2find.com whatever is on your mind to keep the guys occupied!
yes, we know we have been a little bit silent in the last few weeks…. ok, ok, I confess, months. I just wanted to jump in and calm all of you down who are worried about tag2find being alive. Yes, we are still here! We are focused on developing. tag2find NG is a very major rewrite, so it unfortunately takes some time. Just give us a little bit more time.
And thanks to all of you who have contacted us in the forum, the blog or via e-mail and offering your help. It is very much appreciated and we do all we can to deliver a product which has been worth waiting for!
I am Tine and from now on I will work in the tag2find development team.
