The Yorba Foundation, a group of developers working on applications like Geary or Shotwell, is no more, and the projects are now available through the GNOME stack.

A lot of hopes have been put into the Geary email client, and users were hoping that it’s going to evolve into a powerful alternative for Mozilla’s Thunderbird. It was in the works for a good while, and at one point it even looked like it’s going places. Unfortunately, the Yorba guys have moved on to other things and the email client never reached its potential.

They were also working on Shotwell, a really good image viewer that was adopted by default in a number of Linux distributions. It was in a much more advanced and stable state than Geary, so it’s no big problem for now. The developers were also working on the Valencia gedit plugin for Vala and gexiv2 GObject, a wrapper around Exiv2.

Projects live on with GNOME

From the looks of it, these projects are now available in the GNOME stack, but it’s not clear if they have some new developers or at least a maintainer. Most likely it’s none. It’s also worth pointing out that the Elementary OS developers have already adopted Geary and Shotwell, but they already have other names. Geary, for example, was provided by default in Elementary OS, so it’s definitely a loss for them.

‘Yorba was a non-profit free software group based in San Francisco that was active from 2009 until early 2015. This site lists the programs Yorba developed, all of which are now hosted at GNOME,” the official website reads.

The GitHub project has been updated as well to reflect the fact that Yorba is no more and explains that both founder Adam Dingle and developer Jim Nelson are no longer doing any kind of work related to the Yorba Foundation.