On Sun, 09 Jun 2013 10:13:00 -0400 Kenneth Lerman <kenneth.ler...@se-ltd.com> wrote:
> 3 -- So you believe that LinuxCNC should be actively promoted or that > it should be left alone to exist in peace? I don't think it needs TV commercials or anything like that :) I think if a company sold machine tools that use linuxcnc, then they should be able to advertize that fact as a feature. I'll go farther than that and say that I hope that someone looking to buy a machine tool will view the fact that linuxcnc is used for the control system as a positive feature. I'll be completely satisfied when someone looking to buy a machine tool says to a machine tool salesman, "If only this thing had a linuxcnc based control on it, I'd buy it". I view popularity as a good thing, but the only thing you can do to achieve it is to be better at giving users what they need. > 5 -- Should it be protected by strong licensing from those who might > attempt to use it without contributing back to the community? Or > should it be sown upon the earth freely for anyone to use in any > fashion they wish without the hassles of legal contracts? First of all, I'm obligated to not place any restrictions on anyone else's use of the code (at least the NIST derived part anyway). But, if you were to ask me what I would like the situation to be if we were starting fresh today, I like the "LGPLv2.1 or later" where possible, otherwise "GPLv2 or later". This gives the authors share-and-share-alike protection of their interests with maximum license interchangeability. IMHO this is the sweet spot on the carrot/stick curve. > 6 -- Should there be a formal organization that manages the future of > LinuxCNC? No. Certainly not a legal entity of any sort. If we ever implement contributor license agreements, they should not include copyright assignment. However, I think we might profit from a little more organization than we have now. For example: 1. We should have a plan for each subsystem that describes the current state of affairs with an emphasis on outstanding bugs and changes that are wanted to be made. 2. We need a way to put questions to our users and to get non-fraudulent, reasonably accurate feedback so that we can make decisions at a more rapid pace than we do with our current twice-a-decade meetings :) What I imagine this would look like is an internet accessible voting machine that presents the questions as multiple choices that you rank in order of preference. The results should be analyzed in several ways (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borda_count ) to help us understand what the users want. I'm thinking that anyone who is interested would "register to vote" and upon being proven to be human, and interested in linuxcnc, would be given some sort of cryptographic token that would enable use of the voting machine (one man, one vote). Some allowance might even be made for anonymous voting. 3. We need a better way for users to discover who is in charge of a particular facet of linuxcnc development. _I_ know that the documentation is largely handled by a guy named John Thornton, but I'm not sure that's obvious to anyone who might need to know that. We also might want to be able to get small ad hoc groups together for the specific purpose of answering a question, like say we put three guys on a two week project to figure out what options we have with respect to <some technical thing>. Thanks, Matt ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ How ServiceNow helps IT people transform IT departments: 1. A cloud service to automate IT design, transition and operations 2. Dashboards that offer high-level views of enterprise services 3. A single system of record for all IT processes http://p.sf.net/sfu/servicenow-d2d-j _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list Emc-developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers
