Stefan does have his head screwed on straight. Here is an email we recently sent him:
From: Raquel Velasco and Bill Buck <bbrv@genesi.lu>
Date: January 13, 2005 10:12:52 AM CST
To: Stefan Stuntz
Subject: for the record
Stefan, there seems to be some confusion on the part of others about our discussions related to the future of MorphOS.
For the record, we were agreeable to the terms we worked out with you. We do acknowledge the value of your work and saw your future involvement as essential.
Unfortunately, we no longer felt comfortable with the development in general thus it made little sense to invest further into the effort. If we had we would have paid you.
Best regards,
Raquel and Bill
===========
There are other issues. First, what Ralph thinks and secondly, how the developer community is managed going ahead. All must recognize that MorphOS is more than an "open source" development and after we had financial troubles it was difficult to "manage" anything. Under the circumstances Ralph did a good job.
Here is what we had to say about this subject to a journalist this morning:
Quote:
The problem is really alot greater than that and frankly it is more about managing software development. We feel governance is _everything_ . Most people in the MorphOS Community have been focused on the applications integration or the money issues as the problem. In our view that is not the real issue. We think it is absolutely essential to have the right management and organization to attract the right developers and push the OS to greater success. We certainly had a following of senior IT journalists and editors that were cheering for us. Unfortunately, we could not get this operational organization to work right without additional and significant investment that FAR exceeded the potential value of attracting users to the platform.
We are patently sick of the ego-centric "key man" or "benevolent dictator" model used by many open source projects. MorphOS was and is not open source, but there was this prevailing mentality that everyone who was not viewed to be "inside" was a "lamer." These notions further destroyed the effort. You cannot base a commercial product on this sort of "reliability."
Thus, we are going to give this a try (see lead story). They have a good governance structure in place and are happy with free machines!
http://www.gentoo.org/
We may learn something from this experience. Of course, if there was plenty of money there would have been no problems for MorphOS (and maybe even the governance of it, but sadly this was not the case.
We still stand by our "Brainstorming" post. Maybe something can be salvaged.
R&B
P.S. As for the latest addition to MorphOS.net this has proven to be false too. Nate posted
HERE.
