In the past, warriors could use dead rat with illness to kill enemies. The rats were just put into the water reserve. The best way to be sure that everyone will drink the poison. Is there a better way to prevent people from using Linux than to show them unstable software unstable operating system and always evolving version without real fix?
Mickeyl, you were part of all discussions on opie@handhelds.org mainling list. If you can't remember what happened there again and again than people should easily understand why so much developers stopped their contribution. This terrible memory of remaining Opie developers is one of the many things that explain why it must stay dead horse. I'm not frighten. Just more and more in pressure to do something to change things. If my own memory is still efficient, I read a post from you on the mailing list saying that you didn't want to contribute any more because of the way of the project was managed, then you stopped to send patch. In another one, you were disgusted by the way the bug tracker was frozen by its maintainer. In many and many threads people were complaining again and again about bugs into Media player, bugs into ipkg, bugs into any part of Opie or familiar. Developers like Harlekin tried to change things for ipkg for example but was hunted by the well trained familar doorkeepers. Many from the translation team has been disgusted one by one by all this strange management choice (disgusted as I was when I left) and they stopped to do their job on the cvs repository. And during all those years, all those guys weren't alone to complain about the different project parts. The developers who didn't want any more to participate in the discussion were saying something even stronger than the ones who were still posting and asking for a revamp.
You are still there because you are still evolved into OE because you love python programming. I guess this as I saw that you released a python book (before to begin to work on OE, I clarify). But other developers have gone away with smaller or bigger quarrel than yours.
As long as the keys won't be in good hands, there won't be any future for OPIE or any other handhelds.org projects. The "no forking, no more segmentation" is no more a solution. "No forking, no segmentation" can then be seen as a very big trap. It's like a fish into a net. I see OpenEmbedded as a big trap too. As long as this project will be more for companies needing Linux distribution than for building a really stable distribution for us Zaurus/iPaq/Yopy/... users it will be a big developer trap. Why should we care about those external companies projects who fit their own needs and not our? As such... OE is not interesting for me because it creates a big illusion and a big frustration. People want something to use and that work and no more vaporware. Developers want to play with other developers and not to be stuck by companies. This last sentence is exactly why Richard Stallman, the GNU project father, started the now big freesoftware movement.
Having a stable OZ is a 1 month work on an OE snaphot but nobody from OE want that. This illusion that someday OpenZaurus will work well and the frustration to see that developers are just playing in reinventing the wheel again and again is now a beautiful weapon to prevent people or developers from living in the Linux pda market. Note that pdaXrom with mainly one developer has done in a few months what your mexican army couldn't do in years.
Without the keys on website ftp cvs and bug tracker and with the use of good vaporware project and well trained doorkeepers, any company can try to disturb open source move. Things like "porting OpenEmbedded to Yopy" for example from the same guy who created
www.yopy.org and
http://sourceforge.net/projects/yopy/ (and added me in its sourceforge developer list without asking) or people trying to break project like the one who wanted to convert my translation project into a messy Qtopia fork for Yopy (because I was talking too much about a free Linux OS for PDA)...
All open source projects will suffer from those strategies but nobody can prevent the open source to move forward. It will just slow down and redistribute the power to those who understand how to bypass those traps. Like virus... open source actors will just be stronger. This is how MS could call the GPL: the virus of freedom.
