status of projects.openmoko.org

Rod Whitby rod at whitby.id.au
Tue Dec 16 10:12:58 CET 2008


Marek Lindner wrote:
> as discussed some weeks back Openmoko wants to reduce the time spent on other 
> things next to the phone. Part of that process is the shutdown of our 
> projects.openmoko.org server. In the past we spent considerable time and effort 
> maintaining it. As many people noticed things were not perfect and caused 
> trouble quite often. 
> 
> We know some people feel it is the right place to concentrate the code that 
> runs on the Openmoko platform. The decentral nature of the Internet & the FOSS 
> community has proven to work well because everybody is focussing on what they 
> think they can contribute. There are much better project platforms out there. 
> For Openmoko it does not make sense trying to compete with them.

Two months ago I sent a post to this very list about what an Openmoko
community manager should do.  I'll highlight two of the points I made:

I wrote:
> b) Maintain a single build system and set of repositories which makes it
> easier for all those disparate developers to use the "Openmoko"
> developer resources instead of setting up their own elsewhere.  Make the
> barrier to entry very low (if you can write either the code or the
> manual page or the build system or the gui for "hello, world" for the
> openmoko, then you're qualified to have access to the SVN or Git
> repository).  Trust that developers will not abuse the repository,
> instead of forcibly locking them out.
>
> c) Manage those developer resources (mailing list, repositories, wiki)
> like they are your crown jewels.  Never let an external developer be
> inconvenienced because some mailing list is sending duplicate messages,
> or some repository system is not allowing anonymous svn checkouts, or
> some autobuilder is not producing daily kernel packages.

The closure of projects.openmoko.org is (IMHO) a step in the wrong
direction, since it further fragments the openmoko developer resources
and community.

This action says "Openmoko does not value the contributions of the
community developers who use projects.openmoko.org enough to pay for a
single junior system administrator position to manage it".  I think that
severely undervalues the contributions of all the community developers
who have taken the time and effort to set up on projects.openmoko.org

Let alone that there still isn't a community manager appointed ...

-- Rod (who now needs to move MokoMakefile yet again)



More information about the devel mailing list