Recent Free Software that has suffered large delays

Many free software projects have been aiming for the "Blue Sky" and this has lead to frustration of the user base, the third-party developers and the developers of the project as they see how their project takes on new dimensions of complexity and more delays.

Internal interface changes hurt people and annoy people who are working closely with the development team. External interface changes manage to annoy third party software developers that depend on the project.

Many of the Open Source projects lack a direction because of the way they are developed. And changes and features to the core of the system are added because someone submitted a patch. Sometimes the patch takes the project in non-unified directions, and if the cool factor is large enough, it leads to core interface changes that annoy developers.

The next generation projects

These are some of the "next generation" projects that the free software community has tackled recently and which have missed their architects desired schedules.

Gtk 2.0

The current Gtk 2.0 effort to clean up and improve Gtk+ was supposed to be done by the end of august (when the first "feature freeze" was declared) and it has still not been finished. Gtk+ 2.0 introduced:

Large architectural changes (rendering, cross platform support, pango).
New features (many new API calls).
API cleanups and API breakage.

KDE 2.0

KDE 2.0 was another project that was delayed for a long time because of the nature of the changes they made. The KDE project aimed too high for their KDE 2.0 release: they did incorporate and later they had to drop "OpenParts" support which was a major change to their system.

KDE 2.0 was also a very ambitious project, and the nature of the changes delayed the project for a whole year.

Linux 2.4

The original code freeze for the Linux 2.4 was on September 1999. It was released on early Jannuary 2001.

Linux 2.4 included as well large architectural changes, changes to the core abstractions, large ammount of new features, lots of internal API breakage and more features (drivers and ports).

The New Code Bases.

Evolution

Evolution was originally scheduled for a June 2000 release. An over-optimistic schedule for the project. There was more going on behind the scenes than originally planned.

It is another project that was very ambitious from the beginning, and was also being developed against changing APIs (bonobo, oaf, gconf, gtkhtml, pixbuf, gnome-vfs and oaf).

Currently Evolution is scheduled for a June 2001 release.

Nautilus

The GNOME 1.4 file manager which was planned to be released originally around June/July 2000 is coming to us in March 2001. After a nine months schedule slip.

The project was extremely ambitious, of course. Around the same time that Nautilus work begun KHTML also begun their architectural changes to support CSS and they also begun working on what became the current Konqueror (the one without the CORBA-based OpenParts).

Nautilus was affected by an unstable API to develop against (bonobo, gnome-vfs, gconf, gdk-pixbuf, and oaf) as well as an optimistic planning.