Open Working

From the USB Stack thread, which had drifted…

There was a lot of frustration there

Yes, there is. And some of it has been resolved by the things that have been said on this forum, and some have not.

For example, I still can’t see why RComp get preferential access to Iris and are allowed to rebadge it for their own systems. HOW is this fair on other vendors? Unless other vendors are given the same access, this gives RComp a clear market advantage. It consistently feels like Iris is an RComp product, not a RiscOSDev product.

Back to the topic, then, and given that RiscOSDev like to “pre-announce” what they’re doing, what is RiscOSDev’s plan for the USB stack and how does it differ from what the Bounty asks for? If RiscOSDev and ROOL are working collaboratively, then surely the USB bounty should reflect both sets of needs. Otherwise it’s duplication of effort, having two people attempting different things with the USB stack. As @ Rick Murray accurately said:

it seemed to me that the worry was that if certain organisations were going to go off in their own directions, it risks a situation such as that which happened in the [past]

I am lead to believe by someone who attended the ROUGOL Awards show that this was a nomination for the Broken Cog Award too? So it clearly isn’t just me who is concerned by this.

For me, these points also echo my concerns.

@Richard Walker said

But sometimes these developments feel a bit like a secret club.

@Peter Howkins said

Things are discussed and decided behind closed doors

@Rick Murray said

However don’t do things behind closed doors either

The whole Iris thing, upon reading back and watching videos, feels exactly like this. “Shareholders” or whatever they are, had to sign NDAs, I understand: “We’re going to build a browser, but don’t tell ayone”? I am worried that any USB stack work outside of the bounty could end up going the same way. Hence my original posting on this topic.

@Andrew Rawnsley said

It is also easy to forget that a lot of us work best on phonecalls.

That’s great, but it means nobody else knows a jot of what’s happening. And that may deliberate, or it may be unintentional, but it does mean the essence of that conversation is lost to others who are interested. I’m sure you don’t want to have the same coversation multiple times a day to help clarify things to lots of interested parties. Perhaps get your web designers to use the News section of the riscosdev.com website properly. Do people really want to know that there were some shows in 2019 and 2020?

I understand your browser point. Suffice to say that we do try to act fairly, and that I (personally) ensure that the public release of Iris is always ahead of any R-Comp release,

Which is my point over Iris. An R-Comp release. Why do R-Comp get to release a separate version? Do others? As I am repeatedly told, RComp and RiscOSDev are separate companies, so why does this happen?

On a conciliatory note:

@Andrew Rawnsley said

I understand your browser point. Suffice to say that we do try to act fairly, and that I (personally) ensure that the public release of Iris is always ahead of any R-Comp release, which is actually to my detriment. For example, you could buy a Pi400 (say), and add Iris to get the most recent public release, for less money than anything R-Comp sells.

I’m not sure what you mean here. If you wish to clarify, that would be helpful.

Indeed, that has massively (negatively) affected my business (to a point that it affects my mental health), so I assure you I am not benefiting.

And I can only say that I am sorry that your mental health is negatively affected. That is not good for you, your family or anyone.

I’d ask that you give both ROOL and ROD enough credit that we all learn from the past and are not interested in repeating the mistakes of our forbears. Let’s go forwards positively :)

I was reluctant to make that point initially, because I didn’t want to create a self-fulfilling prophecy. But the “poaching” approach created some concerns for me that it felt like sidelining. I don’t want to damage RiscOS, as I know you don’t.

@Richard Walker said

Andrew is boldly standing up and trying to coordinate. That enthusiasm is great

That is very much appreciated. I think it is fair to say he has, with a number of others, significantly helped keep RISC OS alive for the past decade. Thank you.

BUT we’re all still not looking at the bigger picture, which is keeping the platform alive. This needs new users. We had or have the biggest opportunity to grab a whole load of new users, with the Raspberry Pi. Currently, they can buy a very capable RiscOS machine for £35, add an SD card with the ROOL image and they’re good to go. And they want to get on the Internet, so load up Netsurf and, as @Rick Murray put it, they’re back to 1998. They then see that a browser is available that does much more modern stuff, but unless they buy some different hardware (from one particular vendor, but that’s not my point here), they have to pay £49 to get access to it! More than they paid for the Raspberry Pi for something that people, on almost all other platforms, expect to be free. After thirty years of using RiscOS, I accept it’s shortcomings, but new and potential users won’t, and will move on, and we need them to stay.

Just release Iris to all and be done with, give the source to ROOL to publish (or publish it yourself), and let other skilled and experienced users contribute.

For example, I still can’t see why RComp get preferential access to Iris and are allowed to rebadge it for their own systems. HOW is this fair on other vendors? Unless other vendors are given the same access, this gives RComp a clear market advantage. It consistently feels like Iris is an RComp product, not a RiscOSDev product.

Lets correct few of your comments, firstly !Iris is still offically a beta product, not yet finished. The version as supplied on the ARMbook was a cutdown verion of an early development version. Have you asked the only three other vendors of RISC OS computers, RISCOSbits, CJE Micro, and Elesar? Have you considered they might not want !Iris or a cutdown version yet on their Hardware.

Back to the topic, then, and given that RiscOSDev like to ‘pre-announce’ what they’re doing, what is RiscOSDev’s plan for the USB stack and how does it differ from what the Bounty asks for? If RiscOSDev and ROOL are working collaboratively, then surely the USB bounty should reflect both sets of needs. Otherwise it’s duplication of effort, having two people attempting different things with the USB stack.

As Andrew keeps says ROOL and ROD are working together with regular meetings on things, from my reading of things Andrew was asking the OP who was coming back to RISCOS to have a word to help prevent any deplication of work/effort. i.e. co-ordinating the work and appears to add to the bounty as promoted on the ROOL site. That is part of ROD job. The same with the new network Stack getting everyone who wants to work on it to work in a co ordinated way to progress things. This is NOT poaching as you seem to think, its coordinating resourses.

And I can only say that I am sorry that your mental health is negatively affected. That is not good for you, your family or anyone.

Sadly it comes across as you are not helping it in your postings.

They then see that a browser is available that does much more modern stuff, but unless they buy some different hardware (from one particular vendor, but that’s not my point here), they have to pay £49 to get access to it!

Anybody can buy the public beta of !Iris via the !Store it includes a copy !Obrowser as well – which is the otter browser with a RISC OS front end, you are paying towards the development costs of creating and mantaining the new browser. The initial shareholders as I understand it who invested in ROD got the first look at the new browser, followed by those who purchased the Obrowser CD somewhat later, again this helped raise funds for the continuing development of the new browser.

ROD have said that !Iris will be released generally when they feel its more stable.

Sorry if this is scattered. Very hot here yesterday, I didn’t sleep at all well and my mind is quite frazzled.

had to sign NDAs

Yes. That bit seems bizarre. But has been noted with things like “announcement at the show!” and the utterly deplorable state of some websites, not to mention the ass-backwards payment methods used by some in these parts, it’s like everything psychologically ground to a halt when Acorn closed their doors. It’s only just very recently that streaming video at shows became “a thing”, mostly – I suspect – because we were lucky enough to find somebody who “gets” YouTube. ;)

So, NDAs seem weird, but it’s kind of that late 90s “hush hush it’s a secret until it isn’t” mentality.

Rather than arguing, we should gently introduce those concerned to the 21st century.
But very gently, as anybody paying attention would feel like screaming and running to hide under the nearest rock.

but it does mean the essence of that conversation is lost to others who are interested.

Not to mention easily misrepresented if somebody thinks something was said that actually wasn’t. At least discussing concerns here with everybody means that not only is everybody reading the same thing, that only needs written once, but there’s also a message they can be pointed to when saying “no, I actually said [link]”.

Do people really want to know that there were some shows in 2019 and 2020?

Better yet, shove some comment tags into the HTML and remove it entirely.
I get that Andrew doesn’t have a lot of time, nor a big support team, but if nobody is capable of spending about twenty minutes a week to bash out some “news”, then just get rid of it. It doesn’t do them any favours to have news articles promoting shows that were in those Halcyon pre-Covid days (remember them?). It makes the platform look, well, dead.

Just release Iris to all and be done with

I suspect a lot of the cloudiness that you’re seeing here is because Andrew, with whatever company’s hat he chooses to wear, is hoping for ROI. No, not Republic of Ireland, Return On Investment. The browser project will have cost cold hard cash, and saying “bububut it’s all open source and open source is good” is seriously missing the point that open source is not free.
Sure, it’s free to us, to use and to hack around with, and in many licenses (GPL excepted 😋), free to take bits and botch them into other bits to make yet more bits.

But these things we think of as big open source projects? They cost money to create. All the lovely wishes and altruism in the world isn’t going to change the fact that a programmer needs to eat. If he (or she) wants to grow as a person, move out of their bedroom, and hook up with somebody of their preferred gender? Well that’s going to take a pile of coin. Throw in a potential baby or the whole property ladder thing and we’re talking a wheelbarrow fulls.
Sitting around bashing out code for the Chinese and corporate America to steal isn’t going to get any coin at all unless you’re extremely influential (and then, you’d probably get a better income spouting crap on social media and whoring yourself for the advertising revenue).

Firefox is a pretty decent browser. But, then, Mozilla – in return for making Google the default search provider – gets a nice fat cheque from Google estimated at around $400,000,000 every year. Yes, nearly half a billion bucks.
Linus is paid a salary, as well as having (and having been gifted) various stock options. Random websites estimate the worth of this to be around $150,000,000.
I could go on, but it makes the point. People gotta eat, and even if their output is free to use and distribute, they got paid for creating it. I think you’ll find a lot of the big projects have either funding, commercial sponsors, or salaried employees working on it.
People who do stuff as a labour of love and/or for the pleasure are fewer, because whatever they do will need to fit around the job that pays them (remember, they need fed) and any family life they may have. Not to mention, I’m sure there are days when after staring intently at a screen for eight hours, the last thing they’ll feel like doing is coming home and staring intently at a screen for even longer.

Personally, I too would like Iris to be freely available. I have no intention of purchasing it as I have something superior on my phone (what d’you think I’m using right now as I sit under a tree watching the thunder clouds bubble up?), but I do think a capable browser would be a benefit to the platform. Just generally. So the list of things one can’t do with RISC OS can be diminished a little. That’s a step in the right direction.

However, I also understand that somebody coughed up money to make this happen, and generally spouses and bank managers don’t like it when money goes and doesn’t come back…unless you’re rich enough it gets classed as a tax deduction.

So, rather than risking sounding like ungrateful brats, maybe just see how this plays out for a while?

The initial shareholders as I understand it who invested in ROD got the first look at the new browser, followed by those who purchased the Obrowser CD somewhat later, again this helped raise funds for the continuing development of the new browser.

Which is my point over Iris. An R-Comp release. Why do R-Comp get to release a separate version? Do others? As I am repeatedly told, RComp and RiscOSDev are separate companies, so why does this happen?

Ever thought that RComp may be using some of the money to re invest back in to ROD and the Iris project as they are paying to include it?

After thirty years of using RiscOS, I accept it’s shortcomings, but new and potential users won’t, and will move on, and we need them to stay.

I agree new users are required but just look at the negativity around Cloverleaf, who in my view are trying to look at a different audience, and it seems the “old” users just don’t want it.

As long as their is cooperation and coordination between everyone then helping to spread the load and targeting different audiences is one way to make sure something may stick.

“RISCOS has always been like this and I don’t want it changed.” seems to be the concensus.

Also to new users lack of IM is just as big and Cloverleaf have at least got something with Chatcube which is free to end users but a crowdfunding exercise for development has been derided here on these forums.

Chris hit it right when he stated Iris is Beta and some were able to assist with funding so a initial restricted audience for it is right as long as there is a roadmap on when it is generally available without putting undue stress on the person/team trying to deliver it.

With ROOL/ROD and Cloverleaf we are in very interesting and in my view exciting times for RISCOS and I think we should give some leeway to those who are working tirelessly to try and give us and RISCOS a future.

I am sure that we have all had things we believe we could have done better and no doubt I am sure ROOL/ROD/Cloverleaf have those thoughts as well so lets give them some leeway.

I see you, Paolo, made pretty much the same comments as I did in this thread (I read this one first). ;)

This doesn’t really belong here, but it doesn’t belong in the other thread either.
It’s more an observation:

This is why Linux struggles so much to offer a great Desktop experience, there is no interest in the desktop market.

I can count the number of desktop Linux machines I’m aware of on the fingers of one hand. The company I work for had a brief fling with Linux, but reverted back to Windows (no doubt with the geeks being severely deflated) because while the OS was rock solid and the application suite worked well, the stock and inventory system was a mess. All stock movements on site are synced in real-time to the server at head office, and the Linux package lost so much stuff that everybody was forced to do it via computer and via paperwork. Which, of course, caused all sorts of confusion when the two didn’t match. People aren’t perfect, they screw up. The computer screwed up more. Monthly inventory was being done like twice a week in some cases. Because, being all ISO-numbers and everything, this traceability was not important but essential.
The developer of the stock control system? Wasn’t particularly interested. Pointed out where the source was, said to merge the patches back into the master source.

The following week, everything was running Windows. A whole weekend job for the geeks to translate OpenOffice (LibreOffice?) files into something Word likes.
The stock control was better, but a bit flakey. So the guys from the company that made the stock control system came to our site, talked to loads of people, took notes, and within a week had a better working version. More recently it’s been upgraded to encrypt some data while in transit (because GDPR). I’m sure this all cost the company, not to mention the Windows licences. But it’s what a serious company wants. “We need this, now, how much?” will be how the conversation goes. “Fix my bugs for me” is how the conversation never goes (that idiot dev probably could have quoted an inflated price and they may well have paid him!).

So, the desktop Linux machines I’m aware of? Um…

The non-desktop machines? My god, where do I begin?

• Every single broadband router
• Probably both of my WiFi enabled printers (making a custom OS from the ground up would be crazy).
• Both IP cameras
• The media share gizmo
• My PVR

And those are the devices that I own. The year of Linux on the desktop is probably never going to come (hell, more and more people are giving up on desktops and using tablet-like devices, and many of those run a sort of bastardised Linux) but that’s not a big deal for quietly and almost unnoticed, Linux slipped itself into the embedded sector and pretty much conquered it all, to the point where anything with a competent enough processor and behaviour (in other words, needing more grunt than a breadmaker, washing machine, or DECT handset), it would actually be a surprise if it wasn’t running something based upon Linux.

But wait, isn’t one of the biggest complain in the RISC OS scene that progresses are too slow????

Yeah, the contradiction is that people don’t want to pay for stuff that’s available for free elsewhere, but they want the stuff that’s available for free running on RISC OS.

Yeah, I think I see a slight hiccup in that plan…

The browser project will have cost cold hard cash, and saying “bububut it’s all open source and open source is good” is seriously missing the point that open source is not free.

Yeah someone outs the fud that is opensource!
Some puritans like to believe it is free but in reality it isn’t as someone pays for it and it might just be wrapped up in another way like “Donate here” screaming at you as one example.

Yeah, the contradiction is that people don’t want to pay for stuff that’s available for free elsewhere, but they want the stuff that’s available for free running on RISC OS.

Yeah, I think I see a slight hiccup in that plan…

Hit it on the head as usual Rick.

Some like you say contribute their time but us users demanding do this or that and make it done yesterday isn’t going to help when someone has had a full day and now come home to to sit in front of a screen that just happens to be different and demands even more effort to code on.

I agree some see it as a challange and others as an opportunity to have something differnent on their CV and others as a labour of love and perhaps others see it in a more commercial sense and nothing is wrong with either approach but what is sure to kill that passion is a constant snipping away at what they do.

but a crowdfunding exercise for development has been derided here on these forums.

Quite rightly. The whole “we’ll promise the moon on a stick if we raise six grand” was crazy.

I do support the idea of crowdfunding, and I think Stefan does have an idea of how to do this going forward, but it has to be broken into bite-sized manageable and realistic chunks.

For example, let’s imagine a bounty for bringing hardware video processing to RISC OS, with a carefully written module that is capable of loading Linux kernel modules (because a lot of the GPU stuff is undocumented and supported through binary blobs).
Let’s just use this as a hypothetical, okay?

A quick Google gave me this: The highest salary for a Junior Programmer in United Kingdom is £33,733 per year. The lowest salary for a Junior Programmer in United Kingdom is £18,047 per year.

So, let’s sit in the middle and say 25 thousand (which is about €30K or just a mite less than twice what I make in a year working full time), so it’s not a derisory amount.

Now what should be done is to talk to interested parties. Can somebody be found who is willing to do the work? Either being paid that to work full time, or working part time around other (paid) work.

What’s a realistic estimate of how long it would take to happen. Six months? A year? Two years? That will tell us how much (£12K, £25K, £50K) actually needs to be raised.

This should then be presented as a crowdfund venture, describing the objectives, the intended process, and a little bit about the chosen programmer. Even if they wish to be anonymous at the beginning, their pedigree needs mentioned so that everyone who is going to back this knows that it’s a realistic and viable plan and that the homework has been done.

Then, put it up. It and it alone. No hardware offers, no other stuff, and no twenty pages of technically dubious fanboy commentary on why RISC OS rocks. Just a straight, dry, description of what the money will be used for, why, and how long it is planned on taking.

If it succeeds, great, there’s a lot of cash, get to work.
If it doesn’t, that’s a shame but clearly there wasn’t enough interest to make it happen. Drop it, move on, the list of stuff that the platform needs is long enough…

That’s how it should go. A clear target, a clear objective, one thing at a time.

seems to be the concensus.

I think, even though everybody wants to forget about the past, the schism and also the vapourware do play on people’s minds. Not wanting to repeat the past also means not repeating the mistakes ¹ that led to that past.
Think of it as emotional baggage.

¹ Of course, this is a highly subjective opinion, so let’s just say that things got acrimonious, so a mistake was definitely made, without pointing fingers.

we are in very interesting and in my view exciting times for RISCOS

Oh, indeed. Even though our market (and penetration) is miniscule, it is in some ways more vibrant than when Acorn was around. It’s helped no end by the fact that a perfectly usable system can be purchased for less than the cost of wining/dining somebody.

Quite rightly. The whole “we’ll promise the moon on a stick if we raise six grand” was crazy.

I do support the idea of crowdfunding, and I think Stefan does have an idea of how to do this going forward, but it has to be broken into bite-sized manageable and realistic chunks.

Think the issue is really one of contributing to the debate in a supportive way and I am sure that Stefan will agree lessons have been learnt and surely that is the key as you say.

I know if I look back on things I have done/said etc that I have lessons to learn myself and hopefully many more to come as thats the way we change for the better.

Just to avoid doubt, I’m fully aware that open source means it’s free as in ‘available to see and use the code’ and not free as in ‘free beer’. My confusion is that it was always touted as ‘to be released free to the community’ but now you can ‘buy’ access for £49.

And my motives are not about creating a schism. It is the very thing I was seeking to avoid.

I’ll leave it there.

Not to mention easily misrepresented if somebody thinks something was said that actually wasn’t.

The worst part of this (phone conversations) is that the whole thing has been poisoned in our minds by all those people (I bet you all know a few) who deliberately misrepresent the content of the conversation.

At work the habit of years is to send an email summary of such phone conversations so that you have, by implication, an agreed record of what was said/agreed and what was not.
Sad innit.

My confusion is that it was always touted as ‘to be released free to the community’ but now you can ‘buy’ access for £49

Probably not quite latched onto the actual statements of the time, hence the confusion.

In summary the situation was described as “to be released free to the community in the long term”
Short term there was to be a set of early alphas, betas etc. that would be made available to the financial contributors. Explicitly stated as a “it’s only fair, they get first shot as they paid for it” concept.

The main reason people are now grumbling is the delay from the betas to full release. However, anyone who ever gets involved in anything IT will recall that the 80/20 rule always applies. 80% done in 20% of the time, the other 20% will take 80% of the time.
At any point, the remaining 20% is going to take 80% of the remaining time, plus allowances for the project head or someone moving the goalposts.

And my motives are not about creating a schism. It is the very thing I was seeking to avoid.

Thanks for clarifying that as it wasn’t obvious to me and that just could be my failure to see.

In summary the situation was described as “to be released free to the community in the long term”
Short term there was to be a set of early alphas, betas etc. that would be made available to the financial contributors. Explicitly stated as a “it’s only fair, they get first shot as they paid for it” concept.

I’m confused, RComp didn’t pay for the development of Iris, neither did ROD directly. They asked for (and received) ‘donations’ of over 70000ukp from RISC OS community members to pay for the development of a free browser.

I suppose we can ask some of those ‘shareholders’ what they think of this work being charged for twice as several of them are on this forum. Did you invest on the basis of people being charged for Beta versions?

Sad innit.

You – some random unimportant IT bloke.

Other guy – mid level management, probably got the job because of who his daddy knows.

Who are people going to believe? Especially given that beancounters and far too many in manglement think that anything to do with computing is a mostly unnecessary expense (“why are we even employing you, can’t we just stick all of this in the cloud?”).

Keeping records and paper trail is necessary arse covering in this day and age.

Sad innit.

over 70000ukp

Citation?

Citation?

Company confirmation statement for RISC OS Developments Ltd, “Confirmation statement made on 17 April 2021 with updates”

https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/10709520/filing-history

1 share = £1 ?

I wonder who Pam is, and what (if anything) timber export has to do with RISC OS…?!

Anyway, it looks like this is describing shares of the company. So is it not a little disingenuous to describe it as capital raised for the browser, when there are more things that RODev plan to do…

Who are people going to believe?

The guy that can pull the system logs of what happened when :)
Not that any of my colleagues has done that, this week.¹ We have had instances of the bod on the other end accusing the system log of “lying” – now that is seriously sad.

Anyway, on topic: Let’s just say that the main problem appears to be communication. Communication of upcoming products, communication of existing products and their prices.

As Andrew keeps says ROOL and ROD are working together with regular meetings on things

and there we go – with a meeting every month, surely there should be some summary information coming from that? Maybe not immediately, but with some regularity.

The link between RComp and RiscOSDev seems to have a strange side effect of giving RComp an advantage by having early access to RiscOSDev’s development work and then bundling it with their machines. Do Elesar and other hardware sellers get the same access to RiscOSODev stuff? After all RiscOSDev is NOT RComp, is it, I am constantly told.

Elesar has had sight of an alpha release of Iris from August 2020. At that time the hugely complex piece of software really benefitted from running on a high spec machine like Titanium because of its profligate use of disc based resources, RAM, and the CPU. We provided feedback on some of the more obvious bugs, which may well have been addressed in the last year.

Tied in with such a hugely complex piece of software it’s important to think about:

• Scalability – receiving bug reports by email directly is hard to manage once there’s more than a handful of testers
• Interoperability – resolving duplication of resources bundled inside Iris (eg. CaCertificates, SharedLibs) when they may exist outside too
• Licencing – at that point in time a manifest of the code being delivered was unavailable to check that, for example, any GPL components had an offer of source
• Long term plan – the web’s changing every week, what’s the strategy to keep the port up to date?

As Iris needed a while longer in the greenhouse to grow to full height we didn’t actively pursue whether it could be available to Elesar’s customers.

Steve Jobs said “Do not try to do everything, do one thing well”. Iris is a big project and could occupy a big team of developers delivering and maintaining it, hopefully ROD are giving it their focus and not wandering too far off onto other projects which already have champions.

I suppose we can ask some of those ‘shareholders’ what they think of this work being charged for twice as several of them are on this forum. Did you invest on the basis of people being charged for Beta versions?

Originally the only option to support RODs work was to be some kind of investor, initially it wasn’t even public what the project was about. (I do think that the reason for the secrecy was that we did have pre-announcements of projects in the past which did utterly fail).

The !OBrowse product was to allow more people to do smaller investments in ROD. With the more public announcement of the project (a decent browser for RISC OS) more people got interested. By “buying” !OBrowse you are just behaving as a (very small) investor, at least that is how I do see this.

Either you invests a small amount via !OBrowse (which allows you access to the beta versions of !Iris) or you invest on a larger scale or you wait (and do not invest in this development at all).

I’m definitively not seeing it as charging twice.

@ Peter
the “Confirmation statement made on 17 April 2021” lists the people that were shareholders during the review period or that had ceased to be shareholders since the date of the previous confirmation statement.

On top of that the official statement of principal activities for ROD are listed as:
Encourage and support the ongoing development of RISC OS. This activity includes the receipt of share capital, and other non-trading funds. Payments are made of bounties and other development costs are made to individuals and business to develop and improve RISC OS. The company will not trade in the usual sense and there is no intention to make distributable profits from the principal activities in the foreseeable future. Under these circumstances the directors consider the company to be a mutual entity.

In other words, ROD is/should be operating as I described in my previous post on the other thread, as the Linux Foundation (or in a very similar way).

ROD shareholders with vote can obviously direct the trajectory of the company and put interest where they believe there is for RISC OS (not a browser, just to be clear).
For a proper interpretation we may want to ask for help to a lawyer if people are really this angry (or whatever all this drama is).
However, the choice is very simple:

a) Hobbyist approach only = super slow, things delivered when and if it pleases the random guy working on it, in his/her spare time
b) A more organised form that is either addressed as a foundation or as a non-profit organisation that collects funds to add incentives to the pure passion. Such incentives may help the individuals to overcome every day life issues and get paid to work on what they love (this doesn’t means that such individuals are getting a Ferrari, although if the salaries at the top of the Linux foundation would make us all faint!)

If ROD decides to fund (or increase funding) for an effort, given that such an effort may be more costly or need more time to deliver (that automatically generate more costs), is totally fine and it’s up to each individual to decide if the proposed price for such activity is too high.

Another way can be to use kickstarters (not the way Cloverleaf has done!), to propose projects to the community and collect funding to make them happen if the community is interested (for both software only, hardware or both).

If instead someone has completely given up and believes RISC OS is totally dead and should be for hobbyists only, what’s the problem? Just enjoy it as I do. My hope for the future is simple: I hope RISC OS is still being developed and used by the time I’ll retire, so I can enjoy it full time, enjoy the communities, the meetings, the shows and the chats (especially with you my friend!) and disagreeing on the IoT as always. So far RISC OS, ROOL, ROD, the community has not disappointed me on this regard, but I do wish there were more pace and fun going on than tense arguments.

Personally I am not advocating for any option, BUT, if the problem here is that there is a faction of users that believes Open Source is free (as in free-beers), they can simply fork and develop “totally free-beer RISC OS” by themselves, one of the great achievements of ROD/ROOL and everyone else involved is the Open Source license, so please do not make war, make forks! :)

I know people may react to this last statement, but believe me a fork is the best way for everyone to learn the OS internals, feel the difficulties and the long hours trying to change something and make sure everything still works, having to deal with all its idiosyncrasies and all the other “fascinating” bits it never ceases to entertain us with! And all of this for what? Well apparently not even a thank you, can’t wait to see these subjects starting this journey, bless them.

One of the bits that entertained me today, for example: UnixLib docs still says how to compile using Norcroft and yet a river of errors can be generated by simply including string.h and try to compile the code with Norcroft using UnixLib, lol I love it, what can I say… :D

P.S. Apologies if my comments may have sounded too direct or even offensive to any of you, not my intention, just a life spent coding and can’t stand fairytales anymore (guess my age is showing!)

is the best way for everyone to learn the OS internals, feel the difficulties and the long hours trying to change something and make sure everything still works, having to deal with all its idiosyncrasies and all the other “fascinating” bits

;)

Don’t need a fork for that. Just download the source tarball, unpack it, and try to get it to build. Then, once you’re able to build your own ROM (and boot it), pick your favourite pet bug and try fixing it. God help you if your bug is in the Wimp. Or FontManager. Or any part of the filing system. See where I’m going with this?

and fun going on than tense arguments.

We’re British. We like arguing about stuff. Especially down the local when half cut ¹. That’s why Brexit was such a balls up. We all spent far too long arguing about all the things we didn’t want…

¹ Colloquial expressions meaning “a nearby bar, after a few too many drinks”.

1 share = £1 ?

Yes, see the other documents available for download (the Statements of Capital or the Incorporation).

Yeah someone outs the fud that is opensource! Some puritans like to believe it is free but in reality it isn’t as someone pays for it and it might just be wrapped up in another way like “Donate here” screaming at you as one example.

Or, it might actually be… I don’t know… free? I wasn’t aware that it cost you anything to use any of my software, for instance – and the primary motivation for making it Open Source was to protect that.

Open Source is just a licence; it’s not a business model.

@ Steve Fryatt

Or, it might actually be… I don’t know… free? I wasn’t aware that it cost you anything to use any of my software, for instance – and the primary motivation for making it Open Source was to protect that.

Yes on relatively small projects, made by people who have the possibilities and the will, it can be entirely free for the domain that purely concern such application. But please do not forget that the tools you used, or the OS and the libraries comes from other projects that may be funded.

It’s the richness of a software ecosystem that can allow certain projects to become free because a lot of logic required in such projects has already been written and tested by someone else.

Open Source is just a licence; it’s not a business model.

IMHO Open Source is primarily a philosophy (not just a license). Such philosophy is enforced and protected through the use of distribution licenses combined to the copyright of the original material that entitle a subject to exercise rights (and therefore also give rights to others).

And finally Open Source is ALSO a business model that allows new forms of business to take place: Pay only for the support, Pay what you can pay for this software, coding as a service while protecting the code itself, focusing on warranting the shareholders (and whoever is interested in the project) that a project they have invested on can continue regardless the potential failure of a company. Open Source has also tremendously contributed to reduce Software production costs. These are just examples of the Open Source as a business model.

In few words: Open Source is a social revolution that has indeed changed the way we work and we think of software. This may be something that people like or not, but it’s undoubtedly one of the modern revolutions people of our generation have delivered.
There is no company today not using Open Source software in some form or way, directly or indirectly into their own products and services.

This is also why so many old school engineers and managers struggle to understand it, so please do not consider it “just a license”

Again, my 0.5c.