On Sun, 25 Jul 2004 10:51:39 -0500, Ben Combee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > We can't make our entire tools open source.
I was talking mostly about Eclips and prc-tools - those are the essential core. Is there anything else that you *can* release as open-source but haven't? > Also, we're not closing off contributions from the community -- the > existing Eclipse and CDT projects are what we're basing the product on, and > you're free to contribute to those, and your changes will be picked up as > we more forward. Excellent. Where do I go in order to submit my patches with fixes and enhancements to Eclipse portion of PODS? Where can I publicly talk with PalmSource people working on Eclipse part of PODS and other enthousiast like me about future directions of the project and how I can most effectively contribute my time into improving the project? How will I know that my changes will be picked up? > The 68K compiler is PRC-Tools, so you're free to improve that also. PalmSource can do that too. Why haven't you? > Of course, we're also eager to get community feedback on the > tools; bug reports and suggestions can be sent through > http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/bugs/. As a "community" I can tell you that sending my comments into a black hole isn't very rewarding. It's ironic that Microsoft has a better infrustracture to handle community feedback on their money making, closed source product (Visual Studio http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/) than PalmSource has to handle their developments that are 95% based on open-source (I'm talking about patches to Eclipse and and prc-tools (to which PalmSource, to my knowledge, didn't contribute much despite the fact that it was an essential tool used to create many apps by developers unable or not willing to purchase codewarrior)). So here's my feedback to PalmSource. Bring (now essentially dead) prc-tools to the latest gcc version. Hire or contract someone to do it (for example http://www.codesourcery.com/gnu_toolchains/) Make Eclipse-based IDE a *real* open-source project. Putting up your patches as a download isn't. Even the simplest thing: creating sourceforge.net project and doing the development in public will be better than nothing. And it's not because I think open-source is a saviour. It makes sense for PalmSource to do it. You're in a platform war with Microsoft and Symbian. You win platform wars by creating great OS and by giving developers best possible tools (documentation, compilres, IDEs) to develop for this OS. Microsoft knows this. They have been giving away compilers for Pocket PC for free. It remains to bee seen if they'll continue that with next generation of tools based on Visual Studio 2005 - even if not, they'll at least give a good value for the money. VS2005 is a top-notch IDE and it'll include a native ARM emulator (as opposed to PalmSource's current PalmSim which requires compilation of ARM code to x86). You can't outspend Microsoft and hire enough people to build a better IDE. If you do the open-source thing right and build a community around your efforts, you'll get much more than what you'll put in. With POSE and prc-tools Palm just got lucky. With the right attitude and some effort PalmSource might replicate those successes in the context. Currently the effort is minimal and attitude non-existent. Krzysztof Kowalczyk | http://blog.kowalczyk.info -- For information on using the Palm Developer Forums, or to unsubscribe, please see http://www.palmos.com/dev/support/forums/
