RSSOwl
» see rssowl.org as it lived, on the wayback machine
~ the obituary ~
In March 2013 Google announced that Reader was closing, and for a few weeks after that a lot of us were auditing feed readers instead of doing our jobs. RSSOwl was on every shortlist. It was free, it ran the same Java codebase on any desktop with a JVM, and it had a saved-search system that most of the web-based competition did not.
It was also unmistakably an Eclipse application. RSSOwl 2.0 had been rebuilt on the Eclipse Rich Client Platform with SWT widgets, which meant it looked exactly like the IDE half the people installing it already had open on the other monitor. That was either comforting or slightly grim depending on your relationship with Java desktop software.
Benjamin Pasero had been working on it since 2003, alone, publishing through SourceForge and then GitHub. The first public release was 19 December 2004. Version 2.1 landed on 15 July 2011 and added Google Reader synchronization, which was a sensible bet at the time and looked considerably less sensible twenty months later.
The final release, 2.2.1, went out on 30 December 2013. Nothing followed it. On 8 May 2019 the repository was archived and made read-only, with a note left on it saying the project is unmaintained and carries known vulnerabilities. That note is still the first thing anyone visiting the repository reads.
~ the case file ~
| Born | 19 December 2004, first public release, after starting on SourceForge in 2003 |
|---|---|
| Peak | The final 2.2.1 build was downloaded more than 2 million times from GitHub alone |
| Rewritten | Version 2.0, moved onto the Eclipse Rich Client Platform |
| Killed | 8 May 2019, repository archived |
| Lifespan | Fourteen years from first release |
| Made by | Benjamin Pasero |
| Killed by | One maintainer, and a feed-reading habit that moved into the browser |
~ the Google Reader spike ~
Every desktop reader got a traffic spike out of Reader's death in July 2013, and almost none of them converted it into anything durable. The people arriving were looking for a Reader replacement, and what RSSOwl offered was a local application with a local database, which is a different product no matter how similar the feature list looks on paper. Feedly and the other hosted replacements won that migration because they were the same shape as the thing that died.
The download counters tell the story from the other side. That last 2.2.1 build has been pulled from GitHub more than two million times across its packages, and it has been the only version available for over a decade. People kept installing a dead program because it still worked.
~ what replaced it ~
RSSOwl is EPL-licensed, so when the original stopped moving somebody forked it. RSSOwlnix picked up the codebase, moved it onto newer Eclipse and Java runtimes, and is still shipping builds. That is the whole argument for open source compressed into one project: the maintainer left and the software did not have to.
Pasero went on to Microsoft and was one of the first engineers on Visual Studio Code, an editor that a very large share of the world now writes software in and that carries a lot of the same instincts about keyboard-driven desktop applications.
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