Mathew Davis wrote: > > And I don't understand why we can't have both. I really don't see the > problem so if someone could explain why not having a forum would be > advantageous and not just personal preferance I am all ears, because I > could list a lot of reasons why forums could be advantageous.
I appreciate your viewpoint but here are a few reasons: 1. Our community is small -- spreading the discussions thinly before we have reached critical mass will dilute the synergy. We are just now starting to come together as a community, and I think we even have too many mailing lists as it is (not always clear on which one to discuss X). 2. The OpenMoko team at FIC are spread _very_ thin and lack the time/resources to research and establish a forum themselves. They were overloaded just getting a basic storefront up. I don't understand why a company the size of FIC isn't providing more logistics support to them, so they can focus on the hardware/software but that's the way it is today. 3. Because of #2 and the fact this is the world of free/open, groups are welcome to establish a forum someplace and announce it here. In fact no one can stop it. Then instead of debating it you apply the governance principle of open source, in that if you build it will they come. If so, you were right. If not, you were wrong. A very objective approach. And for those (another thread) who are looking for someone official to tell them how this or that is going to be done on the device, I think we as a community will be applying #3 above - teams will form and follow their (quite likely divergent) visions. Those who (1) produce results that (2) some significant portion of the community approve of will have their work integrated into the core as required/optional packages. And some fraction of those will be cherry-picked by FIC for delivery in the consumer distribution. And perhaps other flash images will arise targeted at "the power user" and "the gaming user" and "the multimedia user". Being open source folks and time-constrained themselves, I rather think that the OpenMoko team will be blessing running code and not managing the various teams that form. And that is good, because they cannot see the future uses of this device any better than we at this point. Not a planned economy but a chaotic marketplace of competing ideas, where decisions are made in the free/opensource tradition of "running code" and "rough concensus". Scary sure, but also refreshing and very exciting. -Jeff _______________________________________________ OpenMoko community mailing list community@lists.openmoko.org http://lists.openmoko.org/mailman/listinfo/community