Michal Čihař - Future of Gammu

All of Gammu and Wammu related projects are slowly dying under my hands in past months (maybe I could even say years). The reason for this is lack of motivation and time to work on that properly.

Last year I've managed to collect some bugfixes and to fix some bugs myself what lead to releasing Gammu 1.31.0, which seems to be quite good release. But since then, I've again hardly done any work there and my biggest motivation for working on Gammu is that without my involvement the project would be probably completely dead. This is definitely not the best motivation and the outcome can be clearly seen.

The project definitely has it's problems (I could name them, but let's avoid making this blog post too long), but there are quite a lot of users using it. Currently most interesting feature seems to be SMS daemon, which is probably superior to what others provide, because this is where Gammu gets most of it's new users.

Unfortunately not much of them are active in development, the biggest contribution I can expect there is to fix issues they face. On the other side bug tracker and mailing list are full of reported bugs. Not speaking of feature requests to support new phone models. Some of them should be easy to support like new S40 based Nokia's, but things like Android, iPhone or Windows Mobile would require much more work.

Of course the big question is whether somebody needs anything else than SMSD. In modern phones, you anyway have most of the data on "cloud" as well, being it Google, Apple or Microsoft and possibility of doing backups to the computer are not that important as in past.

I'm definitely not using Gammu to backup my phone (anyway MeeGo is not supported) and I don't think I will in near future. Simply there are better and easier ways to get my data out of phone than implementing support for Gammu.

Anyway if anybody is willing to help Gammu now or in future, I'm definitely willing to help him.