[openbeos] Re: 3rd Party Opportunities

Simon Taylor wrote:

Here's some thought's arising from the IDE/browser thread recently.
It's a difficult decision to specify which applications should come directly from the Haiku project and live in the tree. I tend to believe the best approach is to keep Haiku focussed on the core OS and the current tiny must-have utilities like ShowImage and StyledEdit.
However with such a small community it would be nice to somehow have "preferred" projects for larger applications such as browsers, IDEs and Office Suites. It would also be good if these projects were somehow unified - sharing UI principles and common interaction and visual design.
Those goals suggests to me the best approach would be to have the projects separate, but unified under some umbrella organisation. I suppose KDE have a similar set-up with KOffice etc all separate projects but with a certain amount of cohesion.
I don't think Haiku should be the umbrella organisation in order to remain focussed on the core of the OS. I proposed a role such as this for BeUnited in a thread on BeGroovy at least 5 years ago, but nothing really came of it, perhaps partially because my proposal also included some crazy ideas on getting users to drive the development process which I have since decided were a little silly.
However I still believe there are improvements that could be made to the open-source software creation process and a good place to put these in place would be in such an umbrella organisation. The main improvement I am thinking of is a much greater emphasis on design, involving not just programmers - have a long period of brainstorming each app, seeing what is available currently and deciding on the final feature list before moving on to designing the interaction side of the app in the responsive, "live" manner that should be expected of BeOS apps.
I don't think I could name a piece of software I have used which hasn't contained something that feels under-designed. I would love Haiku to be the system which people don't consider releasing software for without making sure it has been properly thought out (in the same way people writing Mac OS X software try very hard on the visual design side of things). The best way of attaining this goal is to set a good example, and some kind of unified umbrella organisation that goes about projects the right way should help a great deal in this regard.
How should this be connected to Haiku? Well if the software is good enough no formal connection will probably be necessary, the organisation's software will become the defacto products used on Haiku systems. A simple statement of support for the effort from the Haiku project would be helpful too, I suppose. 

Simon
While I agree with a lot of your ideas, and I also agree with a lot of Stephan's points, I feel personally that the biggest failure of BeUnited was communication between developers and the public. I was very excited when BeUnited was formed, and I thought things were progressing smoothly until the day that it was officially terminated, mainly because I didn't know any better. I seldom went into the forum area because sometimes it seemed that it was just a big competition to see who could post the most messages, and few of them seemed to have anything to do with projects or topics I was interested in.
I never could find good information on the Java or OpenOffice ports, and for a long time it was difficult even to find out what projects were being hosted and/or sponsored by BeUnited. As my time became more and more limited, I stopped checking BeUnited's site altogether, and just assumed that everything was going smoothly beyond my ability to perceive.
If a new organization is formed, I think it either must be completely open, with few if any hidden forums or mailing lists, or have extremely good communication with the community. That was one of the things that Be initially did right; they made us all feel as if we were already working for and with them in a great conspiracy against the bigger OS organizations out there. When Be did it's focus shift (shortly after I started there), we all noticed how less open the company was; I complained about it internally fairly often.
The bottom line of this message is that I think that we as a community need to know what's going on. 
Raymond

--
Raymond C. Rodgers
http://www.raymondrodgers.com/

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