Barely a month after I spotlighted it, the promising, ship-themed virus scanner Kapitano has been scuttled.
The developer behind the user-friendly tool has archived the project announced this weekend that it “is no longer being maintained”.
The app offered a simple GTK4/libadwaita frontend to the ClamAV scanning engine. The reception below the line in that earlier post was broadly positive (misgivings over the need for any kind of virus detection tool on Linux notwithstanding).
What could cause the captain of such a well-received vessel abandon the helm and move ashore so soon after launch?
The answer, alas, is a familiar one: people.
Disdain Discourages Developers
In a post on the project’s Codeberg page, developer ‘zynequ’ explained the decision:
“Recently, I had an unpleasant experience […] where I was accused of distributing malware. Although I explained that the issue wasn’t caused by the app, the conversation escalated into personal attacks and harsh words directed at me.”
“This was always a hobby project, created in my free time without any financial support,” the developer continued, adding that “Incidents like this make it hard to stay motivated.”
Open source developers face many pressures. While feedback and constructive criticism from users is an important part of maintenance (though it too can sting), bad faith accusations can easily sap the will and motivation to continue.
Feedback from users is important to FOSS projects, but bad faith accusations can sap the will to continue
Kapitano was not malware, and acts merely as a GUI for the command-line ClamAV tool that lets users perform on-demand scans of files and folders. It relies on ClamAV’s database of known virus, trojan, and malware signatures for detection.
While Linux is less vulnerable to malware, Windows isn’t. Dual-boot users often want to scan a download without booting in to and opening it on Windows.
Following the end of ClamTK, a gap was left for a user-friendly tool like Kapitano.
The developer has released the source code into the public domain under The Unlicense, meaning anyone is free to fork the project and continue its development without restriction (or the need for attribution).
For current users, however, the app is being delisted from Flathub and marked as end-of-life, meaning it will no longer receive updates but will continue to work on the current runtime.
But all is not lost.
While Kapitano’s captain has gone ashore, the ship—i.e., the code; yes I’m aware I’m stretching this metaphor dangerously thin ;)—could yet see a new crew step on deck to take the helm.