This weekend I had the pleasure of travelling to a beautiful city of Schlitz. After some six hours on train, I arrived to KWest GmbH, a cool company which specializes in manufacturing of embedded systems, and which is nowadays busy developing an Internet tablet for a German ISP. It turned out that the company likes Qt and free software and is not particularly happy with the availability of Qt-based IMAP clients. As it happens, I was not happy with the world of IMAP clients, either, and I chose that as a subject for my bachelor's thesis a few years ago.
After having met KWest's representatives, we came to conclusion that Trojita is indeed a suitable IMAP e-mail client for them, and that while they do have a skilled development team, it would be beneficial for both me and them to work together. We have agreed that they will focus on bringing the GUI of the application up to speed with modern standards, adding important features like address book and a decent platform integration to the mix, while I will focus on what I'm good at, that is, improving the IMAP support, especially the offline mode.
The good thing for the community is that Trojita will remain under the GPL and that I'll be able to spend much more time on its development. Given enough time, Trojita will mature, and if everything works well, we will see a nice Qt e-mail application pretty soon. As usually, both the bug tracker and all source code remains freely available without any restrictions.
I'd like to thank KWest GmbH for giving me an opportunity to work on a free software project that I'm interested in, especially to Sebastian for inviting me and to Markus for being a nice guy to work with. And if you have some spare time and are looking for a nice little city to visit, be sure to stop in Fulda and Schlitz, their city centers look as if they came straight from a fairytale.
