I've used Mitro ever since I heard about it. It's been really fantastic to use, and the team did an incredible job creating it. It has everything I look for in a password manager, even without any updates or changes since it's been open sourced.
On a different note, even though I'd pay to use it, after following the Google Group pretty closely, it seems like Mitro has been unable to foster any sort of development community in the short time the project has been open source. I would have loved to help, but mitro-core is written in Java[0], a language I have little experience with (I don't count my Data Structures class in college).
I'm curious if the demise of Mitro could be a useful case study of how not to open source a big codebase. It seems that they're shutting it down primarily because of lack of development interest, including lack of interest from the original creators. It could be naturally assumed that they were "expecting" a community to form around Mitro, and embrace the open sourceness of it, but that obviously didn't happen. I wonder if the founders would have done something different with the way they open sourced Mitro, given what has transpired.
Open source Firefox took a long time to get anywhere, from Jan 1998 to Sept 2002 for initial release; as Jamie Zawinski when he checked out in March 1999 (http://www.jwz.org/gruntle/nomo.html):
Open source does work, but it is most definitely not a panacea. If there's a cautionary tale here, it is that you can't take a dying project, sprinkle it with the magic pixie dust of ``open source,'' and have everything magically work out.
Open sourcing things is hard, and yes we did the classic mistake of "throwing it over the wall" and not being able to give it the time and attention it would need to be successful. We guessed that would likely be the outcome, but we were willing to try any possibility for Mitro to continue.
On a different note, even though I'd pay to use it, after following the Google Group pretty closely, it seems like Mitro has been unable to foster any sort of development community in the short time the project has been open source. I would have loved to help, but mitro-core is written in Java[0], a language I have little experience with (I don't count my Data Structures class in college).
I'm curious if the demise of Mitro could be a useful case study of how not to open source a big codebase. It seems that they're shutting it down primarily because of lack of development interest, including lack of interest from the original creators. It could be naturally assumed that they were "expecting" a community to form around Mitro, and embrace the open sourceness of it, but that obviously didn't happen. I wonder if the founders would have done something different with the way they open sourced Mitro, given what has transpired.
[0] https://github.com/mitro-co/mitro/tree/master/mitro-core