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Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2012 08:47:27 +0400
From: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>
To: owl-dev@...ts.openwall.com
Subject: Re: Google Summer of Code 2012 (GSoC)

On Wed, Mar 21, 2012 at 09:11:21PM +0800, Pavel Labushev wrote:
> 17.03.2012 10:41, Solar Designer wrote:
> 
> > http://openwall.info/wiki/ideas
> 
> Seems like many prerequisite tasks for 4.0 are delayed until GSoC.

No, nothing is being artificially delayed.  If we were available to
actively work on these tasks now, we would.

> Excuse me
> for going off topic, but when do you plan to release 4.0? Is there a timed
> roadmap somewhere?

This is on topic for this mailing list (even if not for the original
thread).  When we released Owl 3.0, I suggested that we release 4.0 no
later than about now.  As you can see, this is not happening...  There
was lots of non-Owl stuff happening in our lives, so we did not dedicate
enough time to Owl development.  In general, one of the biggest problems
of Owl is that we're doing too little too late.  Part of the reason is
that at Openwall we also do many other things - we got other projects
(most notably, John the Ripper - but not only it), we're involved in
some semi-relevant community activities, we got two tiny professional
services companies with clients and their needs, etc.  I am considering
ways for us to get off this rat's wheel.  These range from accepting an
investment from a VC fund or a larger IT company (so that we would be
able to dedicate more time to advancing our projects, even if with a
commercial focus, vs. providing services to our current clients), to
expanding our team (so that clients' needs and emergencies would not be
as disruptive to our own projects), to getting a larger community
involved and to a greater extent (GSoC is related to this), and to
working on fewer projects at a time.  None of these are perfect.

Another issue is that I am often the bottleneck.  A closely related
issue is that maybe our quality requirements are too high, which ends up
resulting in lower quality overall (in other aspects of it).

So right now I can only say that obviously we'd prefer to release Owl 4.0
sooner rather than later, but there's no specific due date.

Alexander

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