Re: Building a new home for GPE

Neal H. Walfield schrieb:
> At Thu, 12 Oct 2006 15:30:40 +0200,
> Nils Faerber wrote:
>> What makes you think someone wants to "hijack" anything?
>> First of all, this is merely impossible since we are talking about an
>> open source project. It is and will ever be an open source project.
>>
>> Hijacking means to take something away, or even worse, to blackmail
>> someone with taking something away.
>>
>> So, is anyone intending to take something away from anyone? I think not.
>>
>> Is anyone asking someone for something in order to give the taken away
>> good back? No.
>>
>> So please do not use the term "hijack" since it does not at all reflect
>> the truth.
>
> In the very least, the of this effort is to transfer control of the
> GPE infrastructure from you to George. The question which Marcus, in
> my opinion, very well poses: is how is this justified?

Err... you meant we transfer control from George to us, correct?

Well, basically yes, but with the slight difference that the control is
not transferred to "me" as an individual but rather to the *team* that
runs LTG. And this *is* a large difference. Not a single person is
running LTG but a team of people coming from various directions,
partially it is "us" coming from kernel concepts but the majority comes
from the community.
So this alone is a major advantage and step forward, I think.

>>> Excuse me for my ignorance, I merely wish to understand, not offend.
>> Me too, I would like to understand the problems that people see but
>> until now I can only find bad suspicions about LTG paired with some
>> paranoia and quite an amount of ignorance.
>> Real arguments by now have been:
>>
>> - What are the benefits? I think we answered that lengthy enough.
>
> Actually, this is still unclear to me what the actual benefits are.
> You have spoken of "freedom" but I have not yet read where you
> substantiate what this means. Certainly if you control the resources,
> you have more freedom to use them as you see fit, however, I don't see
> how this *necessarily* translates to more freedom for the community.

Because not I will control the resources.

What is so unclear about "a site run by the community" or "everyone can
join the admin team"?
We have told that about dozen times now.
If you want to also "run" that site, you are welcome to!
I am the least person that likes to admin a big site.

The more freedom, since you already speak about it, is that all admin
team people (and again: this can be you or anyone else with the
necessary skills) can install and run (almost) any software they like on
that server ("almost" just means that it should be reasonable and
provide a benefit).

This *is* a form of freedom you do not find with any other free hosting
platform, not SF not Savannah not Berlios, none; even not at hh.org.

> What I would like to see, and what I think Marcus has also called for,
> is a list consisting of: we want to do this but the current situation
> with handhelds.org does not allow us to do this because of this and
> that. Until I see such a list, I too remain skeptical.

I would refuse to give such a list for two reasons:

1. This list changes from time to time. When we started to think about
something else than hh.org (over six months ago!) the list was long,
today it is shorter.

2. This leads to nowhere. It can be pretty easily predicted what will
happen then. Some people will step forward and say "If you would have
said that earlier, we could have done that a long time ago." which is
very hard to falsify and gets personal very soon.

I can just give you one very simple older example: At the time when
monotone was darn slow and resource hungry we proposed a monotone -> CVS
gateway at hh.org (read-only of course). But hh.org refused to do it.
On our own server it would have been a matter of hours to install.

This list could be continued but I think it is really pointless.

>> At the moment there are only a few active GPE developers anyway.
>> If this kind of discussion continues I am tempted to simply "copy"
>> existing GPE (remember it is GPL/LGPL) and continue from there on. Then
>> everyone can see and follow what is happening. There will be no hiding,
>> no behind the scenes discussions or decisions. Everything is and stays open.
> Forks can be good and healthy. The egcs fork had long term
> advantages. To gain developer and community support, you need to
> argue why this is necessary. If so, they may follow you. The emotive
> language which both you and Florian have used has not convinced me.

Well, I always try to be as non emotional as possible.

But there is one thing I really cannot stand at all and this is having
to say the same thing twice or more because people do not listen.

I have writte the above at least four times now. With varying words.
Please excuse if this annoys me but that's how I am. At least I do
respond instead of laying deaf in the water.
(And besides I am pretty annoyed of constantly being accused of trying
to steal something... this is simply not true, makes me emotional too,
but that's another story...).

> Thanks,
> Neal
Cheers
  nils faerber

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