On 12/4/05, Attila Kinali <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Sat, 26 Nov 2005 13:00:34 -0500 > Timothy Miller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > I think Traversal needs a mission statement. > [...] > > That being said, I think OGP should have a mission statement, and I > > don't think I should be the one to write it, although I do believe > > Traversal should have some amount of influence over it. > > I can understand about how you feel to have a document that > shows where you are heading. But i do not think that is a good > thing to have an exact path pointed out by a document someone > has written.
I agree. Such a document would have to be relatively abstract. There could be some hard-and-fast rules that pertain to things that go against the ethics of the FOSS community, but I'm talking about things like "our goal is to ultimately release all hardware and software designs to the community as free and open source software" and "our goal is to optimally support the FOSS community by, whenver possible, releasing full architectural specs for products targeted at the FOSS community." This gives room for Traversal to do work that has nothing to do with FOSS, on contract. And it gives us SOME room to release a product that is good for the community, even if legal restrictions don't allow us to release 100% of the design. What I want are positive guidelines plus some rules about what NOT to do. > At least not in the OSS world. People in the OSS > community tend to stick to gether not because they have the > same goal, but because the paths their are walking overlap. Indeed. But there's also a need to establish some sense of "who we are" for a group. It's like an FAQ. :) > Thus it's natural to have some fluctuation, people comming > and going. The only thing we have to make sure is, that enough > new people are joining to compensate for those who left[1]. > IMHO a fix mission statement would rather block people to > join, because it gives us a fixed goal that seems to be > unchangeable. I agree. I'm not after a fixed mission. At least not for OGP. For Traversal, I think there should be some greater degree of specification. People fear companies. I would be happy if some other company were to 'acquire' Traversal so that I could do this job full time. I would be unhappy if they acquired it and then corrupted it. > Though we all know that this isnt true > (just compare what should be disclosed when OGP started > and now). Instead we should keep the goal somewhat open > so that people can join because they think that their > goals might fit into OGP. After they have joined, they > will realize where OGP is exactly going and adjust to > that. Ok, so some of what OGP's statement includes could be EXAMPLES of things we're interested in, with an 'insert your own idea here' kinda clause. Here's an example of something the OGP should state firmly: We want to produce open-arch hardware. That doesn't mean we won't do software (indeed, we'll do quite a lot of it), but it does mean that if we start a new (sub)project, it'll have a hardware bias and a bias towards designing our OWN hardware, rather than trying to reverse engineer someone else's. (I'm not against reverse engineering. I just have little interest in it, because I get no enjoyment out of it; I get enjoyment out of creating something new.) If we were to design an ultra high-end sound card (for us, the only sound card worth doing), we would naturally spawn an OSS project to create a full-featured music sequencer. But the main reason to do the software is to sell the cards and give peolpe who buy the cards something worth-while to do with them. > Or to put that short: We shouldnt define anything > elaborate as our mission but one sentence saying > that we are going to build a fully specified, OSS supported > graphics card. I think OGP could do with a few more sentences than that. Perhaps less of a mission statement than a general description, though. Why did the project get started in the first place? What need does it propose to meet? Why do we care? And what good can come of it that was not in the original description? OTOH, I believe Traversal needs something a bit more solid. > > Attila Kinali > > [1] The reasons to leave do not have to be negative, but > can be just because the path forked and the one leaving > choose to go the other way. Understood. The only people 'tied' to this are in Traversal, and even then, it's not a chain around the neck. :) _______________________________________________ Open-graphics mailing list [email protected] http://lists.duskglow.com/mailman/listinfo/open-graphics List service provided by Duskglow Consulting, LLC (www.duskglow.com)
