I have been watching this thread of discussion since its inception, and I feel compelled to comment at this point.
It seems to me that what is in the interest of all is an openly available stable base version of BB. Thereafter, it is in all our interests to have a means of collaborating on various projects that branch from this, or maybe fork altogether. And to report bugs and hear of and evaluate fixes.
from where I am standing, OberonCore has done much of this, and Helmut Zinn has done a great service in providing a clearing house of BB components. OMI has done us all a service by releasing the source code, and most importantly, revising the licensing terms to make it practical for many of us to tractably use this.
OberonCore, from what I have seen, is a thriving, well moderated forum, and accomplishes the major part of what I see people calling for. As for primacy of control: I really do not care, as long at the sources remain open and available. I only care about primacy to the extent that SOMEONE has assumed the responsibility to do this. And that the forum is open and accessible. If there are complaints or criticisms, posts and replies in the forum will uncover these, and the forum collaboration process will self-vet the outcome. This sort of democratic approach is messy, and requires patience, but it works- OberonCore is proof, along with the myriad of other forums that are vigorous, healthy points of collaboration.
The main concern I have about OberonCore is the language barrier. I spend a lot of time with google translate with this site, and for the most part, it gets the job done. Never-the-less, there is the problem, because most automatic language translation tools do not do well with technical terms specific to individual technical fields. Of course, the OberonCore's Russian community has had to deal with the reverse, and struggle to get precise Russian translations of English documents. But they persevere, and those of us outside the Russian community would do well to recognize this. And so the rest of us should persevere as well. Anything that can be done to ease this language problem, should be done, but we must acknowledge this, and get on with it. There are international organizations that publish all documents in English, French, and Russian, for example. Perhaps that is something that needs to be adopted: all documents posted should be available in Russian and English, for example.
Let's get on with this.
-Mike
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Received on Fri Aug 23 2013 - 15:43:52 UTC