Wake Up, folks!! (Score 5, Insightful)

John Walker, the creator and for years the principle maintainer of Speak Freely, posted the EOL message months ago, and since then the Speak Freely community has been organizing ways to continue the project and extend the lifetime of the software.

As a long-time user (since 1997) of Speak Freely, I can attest to the care, overall quality and highly useful nature of this package. It has not merely saved large amounts of money, but changed the very nature of the way I conduct communications with friends and collaborators around the world. I am sure it has done so for a great many others as well. New mailing lists have been established to replace the old, and at least one online forum has been offered as another place to carry on discussion about Speak Freely.

Overall, news of the demise of this package is greatly exxagerated. While the founder is leaving, it has already found new homes, with three projects on sourceforge, and developers working on other efforts as well.

This is a natural development in many OSS projects, the orginator sees less utility in the project than others do, and they are free to pick it up. Rather than mourn the loss of this excellent software or wring my hands over the end of OSS, I believe this is in general a healthy develpment, and I'm looking forward to more years of using this package.