On Sat, 2012-04-07 at 18:24 +0200, R. Diez wrote: > > That is a most unfair accusation, and I am not sure why you are making > > it. > > [...] > > I am worried that the OpenRISC ecosystem is increasingly gravitating > towards a private company. Most private companies don't really like open > source and tend to want full control in order to capitalize as much as > possible on the "investement", and that's what's happening here. Nothing > moves easily without the approval from payed employees/contractors.
Ruben, This is getting silly. You are doing good work, which is respected by the community, but you seem determined to upset them all. There are plenty of companies which are fully committed to open source. What about Canonical, Red Hat, IBM, Adacore, and my own Embecosm. The larger ones even emphasise their commitment by spinning out independent foundations to ensure the community has good control over direction (e.g. Red Hat and the Fedora Foundation, IBM and the Eclipse Foundation). You're quite happy to use Linux and GCC, yet almost all the development on those fully open source tools has been by fully paid professional engineers. The "free" in Free and Open Source Software is about "freedom" not about not being paid - something Richard Stallman has been absolutely clear about since the GNU Manifesto in 1983. OpenCores has always been owned by a company. Originally Damjan Lampret's company, more recently by ORSoC AB. It's no different from SourceForge, GitHub or any of the other similar websites. Like all those websites, the owners invest in the equipment and software to run the site and hope to make a return, primarily through advertising. > Take for example the opencores e-mail list. It's rather new, and new > mailing lists tend to have few subscribers. However, it's touted as > having 1600 subscribers in the Wiki, which is probably a marketing > exageration to say the least. This is an excerpt from the Wiki: > > -----8<-----8<-----8<----- > There is the web based OpenRISC forum by OpenCores.org, which has been > running since 2008 with 1600 subscribed users. > [...] > There are mailman mailing lists run by by OpenCores, for OpenRISC and > WishBone, which have been running since June 2011 with 1600 subscribed > users. > -----8<-----8<-----8<----- > > Looks suspicious, doesn't it? In any case, most of its content has been > "stolen" from this list by cross-posting in the replies, and now you are > trying to force it on us by making it a policy for accepting patches. You're getting paranoid now. OpenCores ran a traditional mailing list from 1999-2008 - you can find the archives with Google. The change in 2008 was to a web-based forum. ORSoC AB were quite public about the hope that this change would increase traffic directly to the website. In fact a lot of the unhappiness last year was because many of the developers preferred a traditional mailing list. Thanks to Jonas and others lobbying we now have that as well. I've taken the numbers off the Wiki, since they are almost certainly out of date - I don't know when they were put there (I could find out by trawling through the Wiki history, but I have better things to do). Doubtless someone who knows can post the current figures. I don't know where you get the "stolen" idea from, and in any case you can't cross-post to the forum - its web based. The only cross-posting is between the mailing lists. > I wasn't aware that people were automatically subscribed to the > OpenCores' mailing list when registering at OpenCores.org (mostly a > forced registration, in order to access the source code repositories). I > certainly wasn't automatically subscribed, maybe I unticked some box at > the time. In any case, saying that the list has so many users because > they are automatically subscribed to it by the registration procedure > sounds iffy too. It's the kind of marketing trick I have seen from > private companies in the past. You no longer need to register to access the source code repositories. That was a battle won long ago. When you register for the OpenRISC project the default configuration gives you write access to the Wiki and subscribes you to the OpenRISC forum and OpenRISC mailing list. That seems reasonable if you are interested in the project. If you don't want any of these, just untick the box. As noted above, like all the other mainstream providers of websites, OpenCores.org is owned by a company which provides you with services (servers, website admin), and in exchange hopes to make a return from the advertising revenue. No different to SourceForge or GitHub. We had a short period where we didn't have this sort of commercial backing. For the first 6 years or so, Flextronics underwrote Damjan's efforts. When they stopped backing the site, we had a couple of years when you couldn't be sure from day-to-day whether the website would even be up. Since ORSoC AB bought the website, it has been robustly available. > The OpenRISC project in general does not look healthy, little serious > development has been done in the past. I suspect it's hard to attract > third-party developers because the environment is not open-source > friendly. I certainly don't want my open source contributions to be > controlled by a private company in that way. Having full control of the > mailing list is risky, as they can filter out stuff they don't like, > like criticism to the company policies. Well of course if you cross-post to two mailing lists, then it will be very clear if your email is being filtered. This accusation gets hurled around for time-to-time, but no one has ever provided evidence. If you have the evidence post it. You want to be a little careful in who you accuse. A lot of the readers of these mailing lists have put a great deal of very professional work into developing this technology for many years. Presumably that is why the likes of NASA, NXP, and Samsung use it in products. Ultimately with open source you can do what you want. You can take your variant away and do it all on your own. You can move your work to GitHub - it will then be controlled by GitHub Inc of San Francisco. Or you can move it to SourceForge - it will then be controlled by Geeknet Inc - a US public corporation. Wherever you go, if you want others to provide services to support you for free, expect them to want your eyeballs for advertising in return. Best wishes, Jeremy -- Tel: +44 (1590) 610184 Cell: +44 (7970) 676050 SkypeID: jeremybennett Email: [email protected] Web: www.embecosm.com _______________________________________________ OpenRISC mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openrisc.net/listinfo/openrisc
