[cc-ing laszlo-dev] I've thought about that as well, but I think that for people who are interested in developing mobile applications with OpenLaszlo, they shouldn't be confronted with the whole technical discussions around OpenLaszlo internals.
Of course you could say that people can still use the laszlo-user mailing list, but my experience is that mobile developers have a whole range of questions around OS, devices, integration, etc. which is not relevant to the normal RIA developers. It could even confuse beginners seeing many entries where people report that OpenLaszlo isn't working on this or that device. Why haven't I talked to the OpenLaszlo team first to create a mailing list? Because there has been - as it appeared to me - no interest from the Laszlo technical management team to discuss a possible extension of OpenLaszlo to mobile devices. With David Temkin as the CTO at Laszlo, Jim Grandy as the OpenLaszlo director there was a lot of communication between the Laszlo technical management and the OpenLaszlo community. I can't even remember any announcement by anyone at Laszlo with at least director level regarding the future of OpenLaszlo, a project roadmap, the IDE project, future runtimes, mobile runtimes in the past two years. Yes, maybe you promise the CEO of some company you do business with to come up with a mobile runtime for Webtop, but we - the community - don't see anything happening! As a result, I don't have any motivation to contribute to OpenLaszlo under the umbrella of Laszlo, if there's an attitude of: "Just add value to the OpenLaszlo open source project, and we'll make sure that it helps US make more money. And in case you wonder what's going to happen with the platform in the future, we don't care to tell you." There's some truth in not communicating, the truth is: "We don't care about you." I remember a discussion with the SugarCRM CTO, very impressive person. He said: "The key to the success of SugarCRM is the enormously active SugarCRM community all around the world". And now check this page:http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/partners/sugarcrm- partners.html SugarCRM has 160 partners in the US, and 90 outside the US. Compare that withhttp://www.laszlosystems.com/partners/ Sugar has been open source for 5 years now:http://www.sugarforge.org/ content/5years/ Remember when I came up with the idea of a "5 years of OpenLaszlo party". You all know what happened, nothing! Currently it sometimes feels like OpenLaszlo is open source only, because it has been open sourced a long time ago, and the company can't make the step back to making it a closed source product. I fear that any community work on mobile components, touch enabled components, mobile runtimes could result in the creation of a closed source, commercial mobile runtime by Laszlo which will be partially based on work by the community. My current plan is to host all the information which everyone contributing to Mobile OpenLaszlo - including the discussion list - at mobileopenlaszlo.org. The website should be a platform for OpenLaszlo contributors and committers around the world, done by the community for the community. Give me a few good reasons why I shouldn't do that, and I'm open to a discussion here. Raju On Jun 25, 5:40 pm, P T Withington <[email protected]> wrote: > I think it would be fine to use laszlo-dev for this discussion. Or we can > create a new mailing list if people object. > On Jun 25, 2010, at 10:10, Raju Bitter <[email protected]> > wrote: > > And here some more detailed information: > >http://gigaom.com/2010/03/29/china-now-blocking-google-mobile-services/ > > Same seems to happening for Iran: > >http://www.rottengods.com/2010/04/iran-blocked-google-groups.html > > On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 4:04 PM, Raju Bitter > > <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Yes, I'm pretty surprised myself. I never thought that they'd extend > >> the blocking of Google to the Google Groups. Here's an old discussion > >> from 2007 where people complain about it as well: > >>http://markmail.org/message/gevc3ckpio3p6jcc#query:china%20google%20g... > >> | All forums of Google Groups are being blocked in China. So, even I > >> | want to access to the internal forums set up for discussion between > >> | colleagues, I cannot. > >> | > >> | Therefore, I need now to warn all colleagues outside China not to use > >> | Google Groups. > >> | > >> | if it goes on, I am afraid some other Google App such as Google Doc, > >> | which does allow people to shares thoughts publicly and with > >> | authorized access, will be blocked as well. > >> | > >> | Google must do something to eliminate this great hindrance for users. > >> | Or it should warn people for such potential drawback before people > >> | toil to set up something. > >> On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 3:55 PM, Henry Minsky <[email protected]> > >> wrote: > >>> Wow, that's an unfortunate situation , do they forbid it in China to keep > >>> people from > >>> talking to each other about politics? > >>> On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 9:49 AM, Raju Bitter > >>> <[email protected]> wrote: > >>>> As I just learned from the OpenLaszlo forums > >>>> (http://forum.openlaszlo.org/showpost.php?p=46470&postcount=17), the > >>>> Google Group is not accessible out of China. I will set up a new > >>>> mailing list which can be reached out of China as well. > >>>> - Raju > >>> -- > >>> Henry Minsky > >>> Software Architect > >>> [email protected]
