TheOneFallen wrote:I'm just going to throw my two cents in here, at first I believed that Geohot had agood intentions and could have done something for the PS3 scene, but when Sony locked out Linux I couldn't help but think Geohot would do something, I was wrong as always. But I hope in the future someone will release CFW and be able to revive what ashes will be left. With each passing day someone else gives in and I fear that eventually we'll all lose ourselves and give up hope. I hope that we all can pull together and be able to contiunue our survival, we don't need Terra Soft or Sony for updates, the Community has kept YDL on the PS3 alive since April and will continue to I'm sure, I'd love to help in any way possible, I'm no programmer but I'd love to help. :3
Hi!
Good intentions aside there is a very real limit, given human nature, what anyone does for free. The question regarding why technically skilled persons, including novices at various skill levels, programmers, engineers, scientists contribute such efforts to myriad projects could broadly be understood in terms of attempting to contribute something to benefit anyone who may not have financial resources to utilize or access commercial software. There have been many efforts by individuals and corporations to carefully distinguish products and projects which are offered for free and which are offered for pay (commercial products) - which is why although there exists something called a General Public License there are at last count a stunning amount of variants of just what that means.
The Open Source Initiative is a good example of this variety. Individuals, Corporations, Universities and Research Centers are so concerned regarding specifying clearly these terms that sometimes they write their own License which a user or programmer must explore and study carefully before downloading that software for use - sometimes their license is a variant of OSI, sometimes it is not and therefore that project publishes their own license to apply to their product alone someplace on the same website where their software is available for download.
The point of sharing the above is to present that there are many, many activities and means where anyone who is willing can contribute their time to "do something" creative and useful. One can participate within the skills one has currently say as a writer, while one studies another area of programming software which one may not be familiar with. There are many open source projects looking for help; if you wish you can look up the project which produced every software package provided within YDL and visit their website and ask how you can help them in some way.
The point of difficulty with understanding YDL is that I believe it is difficult to offer to "help it move forward" unless one understands well the organizational structure which originally created and supported it. YDL, YDEL and various other products and services including the creation and support of what we know as the YDL community was created by Kai Staats, as CEO of Terra Soft Solutions (TSS) and maintained by that company. As many know TSS was absorbed by Fixstars and for a time Fixstars continued that tradition up until Kai left. One more wrinkle regarding YDL, it always was developed within TSS and sold for a period of time as a commercial product of TSS -- only later released as being available for free on the public mirrors. What made YDL the premier Linux distribution of it's kind for so long for PowerPC systems was this dedicated and special production process by a commercial entity which completely controlled all aspects of it's development and release.
TSS and later Fixstars employed this model regarding YDL which is rather different from how Sun, for example, produced products it intended to be released as open source. Sun,now owned by Oracle, kept it's commercial product StarOffice (now known as Oracle Open Office) separate from the open source version OpenOffice.org, although their code base have the same binaries. However, Oracle Open Office and OpenOffice.org remain under Oracle's control. You can refer to their distinctions more closely
here as you do so keep in mind that OpenOffice.org was never offered for a fee although the people running the OpenOffice.org project do ask for donations. Another distinction is that Fixstars, the only bone fide owner of YDL has decided that YDL 6.2 is the last version of YDL to support PowerPC systems; Oracle however has allowed OpenOffice.org to continue development.
The current problem for the YDL community is that the managerial and technical organizational structure which supported it, no longer exists. If "moving forward" is possible it will have to find resources from within it's current membership to organize as an organization, develop a management format and a definition of it's existence while avoiding the temptation to refer to the YDL name which remains and is a name owned by Fixstars. A new name and project could potentially state it's origins as stemming from YDL but it will "as it moves forward" have to be distinct from Fixstar's YDL product. This process -- however it moves forward -- is not easy to achieve. One illustration of how difficult this is which in my view reflects at least one aspect of this problem, is to consider what happened to one of the projects started by Sun after Sun was acquired by Oracle.
Most techies are very aware of the vast amount of projects which Sun both initiated and contributed to which include Java, Open Office, MySQL, Open Solaris and others. Just before Sun was consumed by Oracle there was movement within the Sun community to establish a PowerPC port of Open Solaris. Open Solaris is a very competitive alternative to Linux and it is a more sophisticated operating system which is open source and runs on x86 systems primarily. The movement supporting Open Solaris to be ported to the PowerPC was going well until it was clear that Sun was to be sold to Oracle, and around that time that whole effort collapsed entirely. It may someday resurrect again, but the problem is similar to what I'm discussing as regards the YDL community "moving forward" with a strong technical product as vibrant as what YDL once was. The problem with the Open Solaris port to the PowerPC is not unlike the problem I'm presenting in a very cursory overview. Organizing the technical and managerial talent so that positive results occur which allow the production of a Linux supporting the PowerPC family as solidly as -- if this is possible -- as well or nearly so as the YDL distribution exhibited in the past.
As I explained earlier it is not a simple matter for any user community to come together to supplant or restore or otherwise replace managerial and technical skills towards the goal of developing a respected Linux distribution which meets users needs regardless of their expertise.
