> On 22 Dec 2014, at 9:39 am, Peter Kelly <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On 22 Dec 2014, at 12:47 am, Dennis E. Hamilton <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> I am not clear on to what degree Corinthia Source releases will allow >> building of binaries that are end-user meaningful and working in anything >> more than console sessions. This proposal is intended to anticipate the >> prospect of the code being compilable to store "apps" and GUI-based end-user >> applications on many form factors and platforms. This proposal is >> particularly relevant to cases where forks will compete for monetization, >> including via embedded advertising and also sales through search-engine >> optimization and purchased ad placement. >> >> PROPOSAL >> >> Corinthia project source code releases and the source-code repository shall >> build to "white box" binaries and distributions/deployments with default >> branding as unsupported Corinthia development editions (stable or >> otherwise). Provisions for branding of a distribution (and distributions of >> forks) will be incorporated and given default settings. This also extends >> to producing digitally-signed versions designed to satisfy certification >> requirements for introduction into software "app" stores. There may be >> instructions for how to successfully build a branded and supported authentic >> distribution, but one should not be directly obtainable using the stable >> source without modification. > > I think a precursor to this is us determining what exactly Corinthia *is*. My > view (and I realise others may differ) is that it is first and foremost a > collection of libraries from which one can build end-user applications (be > they commercial or open source), rather than an application in and of itself > (which is a key difference from OpenOffice). While application develop has > been discussed as part of the effort - and I agree is within the scope of > what we are doing - I think we risk confusion if we try and use the Corinthia > name to refer to a particular application.
Actually to further expand on this, I would consider Corinthia to be similar in nature to WebKit. Nobody outside of the developer community knows what WebKit is, and nobody uses WebKit as their browser. They *do* however use Safari, Chrome, and Opera - all of which are based on WebKit [1]. There’s the Chromium open source project, and then the Chrome browser which is the commercial (albeit free) version of that with extra Google branding + tie-in to their services. I also foresee there being several major applications that come out of our efforts. One could be a desktop office suite. Another could be a web-based office suite. A third may be an iOS/Android office suite. A fourth may be a dedicated writing tool, or a dedicated spreadsheet (that is, focusing on one particular aspect). A fifth could be a content management system/e-publishing workflow which utilises the editor and file format support. So I think that targeting a specific application that an end-user can download & use is at this stage premature, and risks constraining the scope of what the project is about. As I mentioned above, I see our efforts as primarily directed towards “building blocks” used for building *many* different end-user apps, with likely multiple end-user apps in addition to that - but each of those apps would be a distinct brand/distribution from the perspective of an end user. [1] Actually the latter two are now based on Blink, which is a fork of WebKit — Dr Peter M. Kelly [email protected] PGP key: http://www.kellypmk.net/pgp-key <http://www.kellypmk.net/pgp-key> (fingerprint 5435 6718 59F0 DD1F BFA0 5E46 2523 BAA1 44AE 2966)
