Re: Jeff Fox

It seems like there has been a new colorforth
distribution about once a month for the last year or
two although there has not been a big effort to seperate
the upgrades into releaseable and non-releaseable sections.
When it was just Chuck and I working with it I released
two of the first three versions and hosted the other and
provided lots of background information.

Chuck hasn't been involved much in colorforth system
development and has been focused on application
development.  Chuck and I are members of several teams
using colorforth in the okad2 suite of applications.

There were reports on colorforth in 2005 and 2006 at
the Silicon Valley Forth Interest Group Forth day and
both times it was said that a new system would be
released to the public soon.  But releasing a new
public version doesn't appear to be as high a priority
to the new team as it was when it was Chuck and I who
were releasing colorforth versions to the public.

In an effort to support the colorforth community I
have gotten permission from Chuck, and gotten agreement
from the team, and asked repeatedly when it would
happen.  The monthly upgrades of the platform for
applications seem to be a much higher priority
than a new public release.  Each month there seems
to be something new that is more important.

I think part of that is that no one was paying Chuck
to write colorforth that hosted okad2.  And no one
was paying Chuck or me to release colorforth to
the public. When a company formed people got paid to
write okad2 apps and upgrade the OS and compiler
they were not told that they were being paid to
publish free releases of colorforth.  I got the ok
for them to do this, but not for them to put this
at the top of their official worklist of projects.
And since they are not being paid to do it and
are being paid to do something that people all
around them are counting on I think they are just
focused on working in Forth.

I have my own theory on what else might be
discouraging people from contributing to the
colorforth community.  Unfortunately the subject of
this thread isn't colorforth release features, or
colorforth release dates, or colorforth programming.