Re[2]: Building a new home for GPE

Greetings,


          I thought for some tiem, whether I want to add anything to
what I have already written, taking into account that I don't think I
can vote for the move or against. However, I feel very uneasy about
the current situation with OPIE. I still don't have clear picture what
happened with it, and I'm for sure don't think it's not cease and
desist from TrollTech ;-). But I already got an idea that it might
have been just the communication between OPIE maintainers and
TrollTech in such a manner, as happening here now might have caused
the situation when needed and valued among community user environment
goes without maintenance.

          And I just can't see something like that now happening
regarding GPE, this time between separated community fractions.


Thursday, October 12, 2006, 3:49:00 PM, Marcus Brown wrote:

> Hi Florian,

> Thanks for the speedy reply.

> I agree with your comment about the hosting platform.
> However:
>   - how has hh.org not offered this freedom?
>   - if there were problems why couldn't they be resolved rather than
>      attempting to move/fork the project?

> I have previously read the post you linked, however, it does not answer
> my questions.

> Now that I've had a quick browse of ltg, I am reminded of a lengthy
> argument on admin@ (etc) regarding Koen. It seems conceivable that the
> idea of moving GPE has been precipitated by that event, and I find it
> disturbing that similarly emotive attitudes have been used in this thread
> to enable what appears to be a hijack of a major project and its sub-

  So people, come on, what happens here? Am I missing some local
gossip here which would answer why GPE maintainers are treated in such
a way? I'm pretty new kid on the block: while keeping an eye on
handhelds.org for the last 2 years, only half-year working actively on
stuff, and didn't yet go thru all the mailing list archives. So, can
someone pass me piece of buzz in a private email, preferrably with
pointers?

  Because otherwise, why would I distrust the GPE maintainers for wanting
to maintain GPE in a community-friendly way as they did it before?
Just because they do that maintenance partially for their job, and use
GPE for their job too? But that's good, not bad - it means they will
continue maintain it. There's social contract between all the developers
(including maintainers) - GPL/LGPL, and I'm pretty well trust, that if
people already work under those licenses, they will work in the future
in teh compliant way too. And if not, the license covers that case too.

  And well, while GPE is pretty active project, the whole handheld
developers community is pretty sparse and understaffed. It's pretty
good thing if there're active maintainers of project, because if there
were only contributing developers, it would be pretty languid. So
again, why upset these maintainers?


  Finally, is there anything wrong with handhelds.org? IMHO, no! I'm
personally very happy to be able to work as a contributor under its
auspices and continue all the great work started within it, and
knowing, that others will benefit and continue it when I no longer
will be able to do that - and all that on the same old good
handhelds.org.

  So, for me, it's not really an issue to wait second week while an
account will be created for a contributor to HaRET project, with us
two would like to work on merging HaRET's fork back into
handhelds.org's bosom. Nor it's and issue that request to add commit
mail for the HaRET CVS repo waits second week either. It's indeed not big
issues, as fairly speaking, we hardly would be able to start in these
two weeks, and likely won't be able to start in some more time yet
anyway.

  And I can only understand when George France says that his testing
of the latest available subversion package for the distro used on the
servers showed that it's not stable enough, because, well, that
latest package is for almost two-years old SVN version. And that there's
no easy way to fix that, as there's fixed effort available for server
maintenance, and that mandates staying with mainline distro's packages
and security upgrades. So, the foreseeable solution would be to wait
for the next release of the distro.

  Again, for me, those are not samples of too important issues with
handhelds.org. For me, it's clear that there's enough effort goes into
maintaining already available infrastructure (and that's being done
quite successfully!), and I'm just happy that it offers, and will
continue offering, services it did offer for quite some time.

  Well, while I'm happy with handhelds.org as it is, and as a newbie,
can wait patiently to see it progressing further, that may not be the
case for every other developer and project there. I guess, for active
projects it indeed may become a bottleneck. Again, it's sad they
can't wait, but well, they're around for much more time than me, and
their timer ticked much more than mine. And besides, unfortunately,
it's not clear how much more to wait to get handhelds.org back to its
full speed, as it was several years ago.

  So, I just try to understand, how to make handhelds.org to be more
useful for more users and developers, and do something I can do now, even
if that's bottom-up approach. And well, I try not to judge too harsh
those who can't wait any longer. After all, we're still the one
handheld Linux community, and will keep using each other's work and
cooperate in the future as it was before. And it would be nice to keep
friendly, not just GPL-bound, connections.



-- 
Best regards,
 Paul                            mailto:[email protected]