[Aldor-l] Aldor is or is not free?

[Bill Page]

On 12/21/07, Pippijn van Steenhoven wrote:
> On Dec 21, 2007 2:38 AM, Bill Page <bill.page at newsynthesis.org>
> wrote:
> > Yes! :-) This is an excellent and much anticipated result of making
> > the source code of Aldor  more widely available. I think we need to
> > do everything possible to encourage this and make possible a
> > collaborative environment where these improvements will be shared.
>
> So, what do you suggest we can do in order to merge efforts and
> create something beautiful?
>

The situation is a bit difficult. Having met with Stephen Watt,
Laurentiu and others in London during the Aldor workshop last summer I
am quite sure that they are committed to making Aldor source code
widely and easily available to developers and users. But the people
involved are like most other open source developers everywhere - they
all have many other simultaneous priorities and insufficient time and
resources. I think Laurentiu has done a great job with the new Aldor
wiki and with setting up the subversion archive, but I do not think he
has sufficient time and motivation to do this all on his own. There
need to be many people contributing to the wiki to make it a viable
community resource and all serious potential Aldor developers need to
have convenient write access to a common source code repository.
Unfortunately managing this on a dedicated site (as opposed to
SourceForge for example) requires a significant investment of time.

I have a strong desire to discourage a fork of the Aldor project. So
in my opinion anything that we do outside of the resources that
aldor.org has already provided must be done in a manner that is fully
compatible and with at least the tacit approval of aldor.org. However
I do not want to put any more pressure on aldor.org. I would like to
be able to arrange something that makes it easier for everyone.

One thing that we could (perhaps) do is setup a mirror repository for
Aldor at a public site that will support semi-free software
development such as

  http://origo.ethz.ch

We could setup Aldor at this site and make arrangements with aldor.org
to synchronize at least the trunk with the aldor.org repository. This
would then provide an open environment managed by someone else (origo)
with facilities more like those provided to open source developers at
sites like SourceForge.

I am interested in hearing what other people think about this option -
particular from Stephen and Laurentiu.

Regards.
Bill Page.