Quote:
Originally Posted by Bren McGuire
I disagree in that they cannot change it.
You make it seem like the whole community and especially the devs are being held hostage, which I think is a fair representation, and if that's the case, it needs to stop.
We cannot have a honest, civil, adult conversation here if people keep telling you to "shut up and don't discuss that". That's not civil. And that's the main issue sadly.
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I hear you...
But (sorry!) the reason why this forum thread came to happen is that we, as the people involved in the AmigaOS 3.2 work, have a very peculiar agenda.
It has become very difficult over the past two years to both receive feedback from the Amiga users for whom we are spending our time on making AmigaOS 3.2 and to provide feedback in turn to them.
Part of this problem is caused by the conditions under which this project was set up. If you want to participate in it, then you need to follow the legal constraints placed upon the work, both as a developer and as a beta tester.
Another part of the problem is in that the lawsuit concerning the ownership and rights to use the Amiga operating system source code has effectively cast doubt on the future of the operating system. What can you do, what can you say, whom do you ask for advice, assistance and are you even likely to receive it?
The outcome of this uncertainty has led to a loss of trust in the entire field. Now it seems to be it's no longer a given that any part of what makes up the Amiga community (which I would define as parties which share common interests) has something to say or share with any other part.
Finally, all of this has led to the pain, the frustration, the anger and grief which the Amiga forums either seem to brim with, or which is slowly rising to the surface.
We are aware of this situation as it is, and we are looking for a way to remedy it.
Given how far things have shifted, that's a big problem to even attempt to solve.
We talked about it, and you are now reading the first articles in this forum which we hope could start a change for the better. Reading between the lines of the Amiga forum discussions which express so much pain and grief indicates the need to be heard and the need to be acknowledged. As developers we have been absent from this kind of exchange because no dedicated channel existed so far for the AmigaOS 3.2 project.
We need to hear from you and we, in turn need to give a rationale for what we have so far attempted to accomplish with our work. Because we are primarily developers, our reasons and goals are by nature technical. What appear to be sound technical reasons for the choices we made so far are not necessarily good reasons in the eyes of those outside our own circle. We need feedback to validate what we chose to do.
Because of how this project was set up, we developers are arguably operating in a legally and morally grey area which raises both ethical and strategic/tactical questions alike. We do our work because we chose to accept the existing legal framework within which it is being done. Our options to and our desire to change/leave this framework are limited by how many layers of legal obligations this framework already sits in. While we could hope that our work and our stated intentions are good enough considering the constraints, we can only hope to affect the framework's layers which apply to us directly.
If you want to discuss these constraints, please discuss them in a different context. Where discussions of these legal matters have taken place, intermixing them with technical discussions and rationales, the end result was that the legal matters, the anger and the grief pushed everything else out.
Sorry for the long-winded introduction, but it seems so much better to say why you are hoping to improve the current state of affairs, and how, than to see another attempt to do so stumble and fail before it has even started.