Inspirated

Instances of unmaintained valuable open-source software have been greatly reduced over the last couple of years. Nowadays, good software is quickly forked off if its developers aren’t active anymore, a recent example of which would be the XMMS/Audacious fork.

Nevertheless, one can still find some true gems lying around that are apparently abandoned by their developers because of not generating enough public interest and ObexFS definitely belongs to this category. Its purpose is (or was) to implement a FUSE based file system for browsing OBEX devices (e.g. Nokia cell phones). However, the most recent version of ObexFS (0.10) was released on July 4th, 2006. While trying to use it, I found out that even the basic autotools configuration wasn’t done properly in the tarball, so compiling the program still tried to link to bluetooth libraries even though –disable-bluetooth option was given to the configure script.

I am not an autotools guru myself, so I couldn’t fix the script. The most obvious solution for me was to install the bluetooth libraries. Even worse, there’s no CVS access for obexfs where someone would be able to commit a patch. I just hope that some developer decides soon that it’s now time to fork the whole OpenOBEX project for a more active resource.

Note: If you want to use the ObexFS software, please note that the latest tarballs of ObexFS and ObexFTP are available on the ObexFTP download directory, not the SourceForge repository.