Dan, it seems to me that your understanding is that anything in JAL is no longer supported or further developed by Jsoftware. That is not my impression.
While I hope that the move will encourage more community input into many of these facilities, my expectation is that Jsoftware will also contribute and for some Addons will retain considerable control. For example in a previous forum message [1], Eric suggested that Help may end up being distrubted via JAL. Actually I'd like to see an "Addon curator" or "Addon lead" (or similar) nominated for all Addons. The idea being that they will lead/moderate/guide proposed changes to an Addon. I like the idea of a lean, mean core distribution (which as I understand it will probably include JHS as the default interface). I've previously suggested [2] that there should also be an easy way to "get" an experience similar to current download. Maybe the easiest way to do this would for separate downloads to include various addons out of the box. An alternative would be as suggested in [2]. Ric [1] http://www.jsoftware.com/pipermail/beta/2009-December/003613.html [2] http://www.jsoftware.com/pipermail/beta/2009-December/003615.html > From: Dan Bron > > I agree strongly with Raul. At the very least, the default download > should be similar to J6, in that you get the engine > (DLL+jconsole), a friendly GUI frontend (GTK), and the standard > library. JHS could be optional or a separate download. > > J's existing community is still small, and we are still in "recruitment > mode", and we should be sensitive about a newcomer's first > experience. > > > The official J7 distribution will be a barebones system, > > that will be essentially what Jsoftware provides and supports > > This statement concerns me. Will JSoftware not support the standard > library? Will it not JGTKIDE? Will it not support JHS? > > I can understand if it's JSoftware's *hope* that "the community" will > support these extras, but I cannot understand if that's > JSoftware's *expectation*. Again, if only because our community is > small. And because we've tried that approach (or similar > approaches) in the past on J subsystems (e.g. inter-J-communication, or > the "open" J IDE), with limited success. Though JAL is > inspiring. > > If JSoftware wants to go down this road, it might be time to reconsider > open-sourcing the engine. Though I don't know how much of > the revenue stream comes from source licenses vs consulting. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
