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?
Possibly. But there are a lot of legal and other administrative issues there that I'm not competent to talk about.
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?
I've found that the Bugzilla system on www.eclipse.org is excellent. For the issues I've filed, I've had great response. There are also many www.eclipse.org-hosted mailing lists where discussions can take place, but simply posting patches there is not as good as filing Bugzilla reports.
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?
The tools-forum on this server is where we expect those discussions to take place.
How will I know that my changes will be picked up?
Hopefully, that will be apparent in the discussions that take place.
The 68K compiler is PRC-Tools, so you're free to improve that also.
PalmSource can do that too. Why haven't you?
I'm not sure exactly what improvements you're thinking of. However, later in your posting you do make mention of updating to the latest gcc. For that particular task, I'm not sure that it takes PalmSource to do the work. There's an informal prc-tools leader in John Marshall who could do that work, or there are people like yourself. When PalmSource prioritizes its work, should it focus on work that other people can do, or should it focus on the work that only it can do? To better leverage the pool of willing volunteers, I would suggest the latter.
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/)
It seem contradictory to me that you urge the open-sourcing of all possible aspects of PODS so that the community can work on it, and then also suggest that we hire people to do the work so that the community doesn't have to.
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.
There are typically issues regarding that that a commercial company has to deal with that individuals don't have to. I'm not saying that it can't (or shouldn't or won't) be done -- just take a look at the Eclipse project itself. But there's a big difference between me as an individual creating a project on SourceForge and announcing it on FreshMeat, and a company opening up its doors in a controlled fashion to an open source community. Heck, IBM even had to create a separate entity (the Eclipse Consortium) for Eclipse.
-- Keith Rollin -- Development Tools engineer
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