Exciting times for Yorba (we need your videos!)

Yesterday was an auspicious day here at Yorba: Shotwell is four years old.  It’s hard to believe that from that rather meager first commit grew the photo manager we have today!

Well, today is another auspicious day here at Yorba.  Some of you may remember that last year at GUADEC 2012, Adam Dingle and I gave a keynote discussing how the open source community could attempt to find sustainability via crowdfunding.  I’m thrilled to share that we’re ready to put some weight behind that idea: Yorba plans in the near future to begin such a campaign for our newest application, Geary, a lightweight modern email client for the GNOME desktop. Our hope is that a successful crowdfunding campaign could bring in sufficient revenue to make Geary a world-class email application.

We hope that a successful campaign will demonstrate that crowdfunding is a sustainable model for other projects to follow. Many of those projects have historically relied upon corporate sponsorship. Crowdfunding brings with it an independence that these other revenue models lack. It allows us to continue to operate independently and build the features you, the community, really want to see.

One key element to all crowdfunding campaigns is a short video that describes the vision of the project. We plan on producing exactly that kind of video. We would love it if we could include testimonials from our users about the software experience Yorba has provided in the past. Please consider making a short video of yourself (under two minutes) describing your experience with Geary and/or Shotwell: what you like about them, why you use them, and more importantly, one or two of your top Geary wishlist items — features that would make it the perfect email client.

To submit your videos, email geary-love@yorba.org with a link to your video — FTP, YouTube, Vimeo, etc. — along with your name, your work or other affiliation (optional) and your location. We plan on starting this campaign soon, so we need your video testimonials by next Friday, March 15.

Wish us luck, and let us know your thoughts in the comments! We’d love to hear from you.

9 thoughts on “Exciting times for Yorba (we need your videos!)”

    1. Filters should be on server side, take a look at Sieve.
      On the other hand, an e-mail client without nested IMAP folders is really problematic to use, no matter how good the other features are 🙁

      1. Nested folders landed in trunk some months ago, and will be in Geary 0.3.

        That said, Geary doesn’t support folders that are children of inbox — that feature will come later.

  1. I have a lot of hope for elementary OS. I am totally pro-crowd funding. I will definitely help fund Geary and gladly buy (or also, help fund) an Exchange (ActiveSync) plugin for it.

  2. Why is Geary specific to GNOME? What is stopping Geary from being desktop neutral or even run on different operating systems? It would seem logical to design a software application that runs on as many targets as possible, specially if the project relies on donations to make ends meet, no? What am I missing here?

    1. Geary isn’t entirely specific to GNOME. The code is architected so different front-ends could connect to the engine, which manages all the mail and network access.

      We’re a small team and can only do so much. If we receive enough donations this round, then we do plan on considering porting Geary to other platforms.

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