Since I've been asked a few times whether it's possible for someone to adopt or continue the development of Ion, now that I'm unlikely to work on it, I thought I should post my thoughts here on the list.
First of all, as it always has been, it is, of course, possible for people to fork a _renamed_ project, and develop it into whatever direction. But, for various reasons, such complete forks are not entirely desirable, and it would be better if any new developments that fit under the banner "Ion" could keep using this name. I always intended Ion3plus as a sort of "wiki branch", where most patches fitting some loose guidelines are welcome, and that still remains the case.. but I won't waste time applying them to the repositories (darcs and my scripts being broken on Cygwin, etc.), anyone taking over its maintenance would have to host it. These guidelines are there to keep the project true to the name Ion, and therefore include * Quality code * A veto for me for major changes that do not simply enhance existing features. XFascistType and Shitorama have snowball's chance in hell of getting into Ion. Ion runs on pure X11, not fugly complex extensions. It's all, of course, a bit vague, as it should be; strict catch-all terms and licenses suck anyway, and more should be based on case-by-case negotations. Therefore, initially, I would have to review all changes to see that whoever takes over, can produce good code (or filter out bad code from others)... take it as a job negotation, or trial period. If I'm satisfied with the results, then there shall be more free hands but, still, attempts at the scale of adding Shitorama or XFuglyType should be passed through me (to be rejected). As for development after Ion3plus, which shouldn't _fundamentally_ stray too far from Ion3, I have some new ideas to try for Ion4, that I'd still like to see implemented. I just doubt I'm going to do it myself... I'd really like to move to the management department already, and have someone else do the gruntwork. I'm not yet ready to just give up the ideas, for various reasons, but if there's good work on Ion3plus... or other arrangements are reached that ensure that they're implemented in Ion instead of a clone... I will consider that. I would also require at that point that Ion be ported to Windows and, why not, OS X at. Not necessarily as a full WM, but rather as an "IDE" managing some nicely behaving embeddable applications. If I magically found the time and interest to actually do the gruntwork on Ion4, it would most likely be a Windows program in any case. (Unless Apple somehow decided to add a Trackpoint on their laptops and support unblurred fonts - or screen resolutions quadrupled[1] - and my T43 died so I had to buy current shallowscreen crap.) --- [1] To replace my 5 year old phone with dying battery, and 6 year old mp3 player, I recently got a Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, as it was the only sub-300e touchscreen phone with standard USB and headphone sockets. (Easily loseable adapters suck. On the downside, no charging off USB, which some competitors' more expensive models would have. But you can get two two of these for the price of an iTrendClown & co.) I like the touchscreen. With hand-writing recognition (which could admittedly perform even better), it makes the device vastly more usable than T9 or even a mini-keyboard. But that is not the topic of this footnote, so no more on that. The device blurry fonts. Perhaps surprisingly, they're not actually that bad in the �main interface. Partly this can be attributed to the "graphical" interface style, partly to usage, partly to choice of font, but mostly to the 230dpi screen, which makes sub-100dpi desktop displays and even ~120dpi laptop displays pale in comparison. By usage I mean that you don't read text for extended lengths on the phone, as on the computer. By choice of font I mean that the font in the interface is simple and thick, so the proportion of blurred pixels is small. It's not so great for reading texts, and the thinner font in the browser handles the blurring much more poorly. But, still, it's vastly more tolerable than on soddy computer displays resolutions, which are still the technological equivalent of the PC beeper, which could not play real music tolerably, only music designed for it. Still, despite the blurring being more tolerable on the phone than I expected, it confirms that 200dpi is not enough resolution in serious use and with a wide range of fonts, for blurring not to annoy. And, yet, OS makers keep pushing on the blur-fascist front. -- Windows may blow, but Linux sucks the crap in the wind.