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Dear BlackBox developers,
>Maybe our small community can support some of the BlackBox activities
>at Oberon Microsystem
We greatly appreciate this!
The situation, however, is a bit more complex, so perhaps a somewhat
less straightforward approach is called for.
By making BlackBox available as open source, we as a business company
have simply acknowledged the reality that the trends in the IT industry
have been providing insufficient opportunities to base a sustainable
business on selling development tools. Even with a better marketing, it
could hardly have been possible to go against the tide - bigger
companies failed here. Correspondingly, we have strategically focused on
an area where we can fully leveraging our BlackBox experience with
modular architectures and the implementation of small systems, namely
mobile solutions. This is an opportunity we want to concentrate on,
although we still use BlackBox in several of our projects.
On the one hand, this means that we are not in a business position to
allocate resources and assign someone to provide on-demand support for
BlackBox. In a sense, we have become members of the BlackBox community
like all of you -- with deadlines and pressure from the
revenue-generating projects!
On the other hand, for our BlackBox-based projects we would like to keep
our BlackBox 1.5 release as conservative and stable as possible -- and
our friends in the BlackBox community tell us the stability proved very
healthy for their projects too. It is indeed a fundamental precept of
the BlackBox design philosophy, inherited from Oberon, to provide a
solid, minimalistic, and well-designed foundation adapted to specific
needs of specific projects via extensions rather than changes in the
core system -- changes that would jeopardize BlackBox's much valued
stability.
Adaptability via largely independent extensions precisely focused on
concrete application areas, is, we are told, a key asset of BlackBox --
and such adaptations are best achieved by those who understand those
concrete application areas best! To maximally facilitate that -- and
thus ensure BlackBox's continued viability -- was a key purpose of
opening up its sources.
That's why it is natural to expect that the growing BlackBox community
would step up its initiative and involvement with the directions in
which BlackBox is taken (indeed we have been receiving encouraging
signals about some high-quality developments that are in the works). Of
course, we are aware of the fact that our in-depth understanding of
BlackBox would initially be regarded as conferring a special status to
the particular BlackBox distribution that we make available, and we
reemphasize our commitment to a conservative course in regard of the
system's core, including the language Component Pascal.
But apart from that -- we encourage all members of this considerable and
highly competent community to contribute what they can! There are good
reasons to expect that the community will not only respond to the
opening of BlackBox sources by a quantitative growth, but also by a new
level of self-organization -- it would perhaps take just a few competent
individuals who can afford to invest some time in the coordination of
open source projects based on BlackBox. The current activity in this
mailing list and elsewhere indicate that such a self-organization is
starting to occur!
With best regards
Your Oberon microsystems crew
--- BlackBox
--- send subject HELP or UNSUBSCRIBE to blackbox{([at]})nowhere.xy
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Received on Mon May 15 2006 - 09:31:36 UTC