Tuesday, October 24th, 2006 at 9:23 am by shura

The recent poll at the http://gramps-project.org site stirs some controversy. The arguments that windows port proponents bring up are the easy way to introduce people to the OSS genealogy, the way to capture more users, increase market share, bring more developers, etc.

Let’s see how this worked in the past. Steve is now excusively packaging gramps for windows. Brian is almost completely supporting the Windows port now. Don and I are just kicking all windows bugs in his general direction and let him deal with it. The gramps-windows mailing list is full of questions and there’s not much in way on answers. Even so, every now and then an email arrives to gramps-devel with some silly windows issue. So the increase in users is there alright, and the support demand is building up.

Now to the developers: where is the hoard of new developers supposedly coming in the increased userbase? Everybody who has ever contributed code to gramps has started using gramps on the free OS.

There’s some hope that things will change once 2.2 releases. Honestly, both Don and myself are skeptical about this, although with various degrees. Don thinks the windows port is an outright mistake. I tend to think that it’s not worth the effort, and as such it will die out on its own. Both of us clearly see that we cannot prevent the windows port from happening (GPL and everything), so we shouldn’t be harming the efforts. Neither of us is crazy about gaining hundreds new users and no developers.

That’s our thoughts on Windows port at this time. If you beg to differ, please contribute to gramps and show that we are wrong 🙂

Alex