Hi Dan, Thanks so much for posting this letter. I've been wanting to respond myself, but its nice to have something from the whole dev-team.
I'd like to add a bit to this and hope to encourage more discussion. The community on this list has been one of the best parts of the internet for me in the past 5 years, I've found a place where questions could be asked and answered without any of the flames one might find elsewhere. I've found a few people who are also struggling with being alone in exploring the FLOSS world, and perhaps alone in art as well. I've dreamt about organizing some kind of local art show reflecting the artistic community existing here in this ephemeral list. Anyways... I am in total agreement with the decision of the Puredyne project. The art is really in how we engage with our tools. It is certainly nice to have a slick, fully functional, all-in-one audio/visual distro to work with... but it is also similar to the current paradigm which doesn't encourage the same engagement with tools that is really at the core of FLOSS philosophy. Its not for everyone, I myself have found that I've been spending waaaaay more time investigating and hacking than making art. But in its own way, what I am doing is art itself. Puredyne lead me to broth and the realization that anyone could start hacking together their own personal live system for whatever particular purpose. This seemed really important to me, much more important than having an all-in-one OS to take care of all my needs. Since then, I've developed a minimal Debian system for myself to learn Lisp (which I hope to pass on to students in the future), and am currently developing a weird conceptual digital zine which is going to exist as a Live-OS distributed locally. I've really wanted to move forward to a broth-based live system specifically focused on learning Pd, which will attempt to guide new users through the unfamiliar landscape of linux and so on. I'd be developing it as I teach myself, and hope to address some of the problems one might run into. As a community, as individuals, our value comes from what we create, rather than what we consume. I think the point in the letter about Ubuntu moving towards a more commercial model means that they are looking for consumers, rather than creators. The beauty of FLOSS is the fact that it gives individuals the power and freedom to be creators and contributors, even if that comes at the cost of "user-friendliness". As a community at the crossroads of art and technology, I feel that the people here are in a place where they can recognize the ways to put the human into the technological. I've always felt that my purpose on the list was to help be a bridge between the human creator and the technology they were trying to master. So, I would love to see a new place for this community to exist and converse and communicate and connect. Thanks for all the hard work Puredyne team. It was nice to find a place that felt like home when I was adrift in the limbo of switching to FLOSS. Much sincere gratitude. -grant On 2/5/12, Dan S <danstowell+pured...@gmail.com> wrote: > Dear Puredyne community, > > As you might have noticed, Puredyne's development has somewhat stalled > with our latest release being Carrot and Coriander. While still > working perfectly on most machines, this release is now pretty old. If > you follow the list and IRC regularly you are aware that we have been > working on a new version, Gazpacho, for a little while now, and got as > far as an alpha release. > > This alpha release was our last soup. > > Truth is, some annoying bugs have held us back from releasing a new > stable Puredyne, and we have been struggling to find the time, > motivation and energy to get the job done. As a matter of fact this is > has been delayed so much that at this point, even if we would fix > everything *right now*, this release would already be out of sync with > upstream. You can imagine that porting, updating and patching the same > packages over and over again is certainly frustrating. > > Next to that, Carrot and Coriander is a great relase and it would be a > pity to hack together a new version just for the sake of bumping the > version number. We would like to leave the community with a decent > soup as our final gift rather than something that could be potentially > substandard (OK you're supposed to serve gazpacho cold, but at the > moment it looks more like a garlicky tomato soup than the famous > Andalusian dish). > > Of course, we can talk in details about the technical issues we faced > in the development of Gazpacho, the growing commercialism of Ubuntu > and the general feeling, that grew amongst some of us in the last > years, that we should instead teach people to hack their own artistic > OS and tune it for their practice rather than provide a top-down > designed general purpose multimedia system. > > All these are valid points, yet there is something else to it, > something more profound to this decision. Puredyne has been around for > nearly a decade, it's time to let go of the project. > Nothing lasts forever, everybody moves one, interests shift, people > get jobs, get fired, resume their studies, have children (4 babies > were born in the dev group so far and another one is on the way), etc. > Life, really. > > Now, before closing the list it might be worth to mention two last things. > > First of all, Puredyne was built with a script called broth. It lives > on top of Debian's live tools. With this script it is possible to > build all sorts of Debian or Ubuntu live distros. Every now and then, > some of us have the need, for an installation, a workshop, a birthday > party, to quickly generate an audiovisual oriented live USB/DD/CD/DVD. > Broth is very handy for that, so that's why we will be still using it, > hence possibly developing it further whenever we need it (current > version lives here: https://launchpad.net/broth ). > > The second point concerns the community aspect of Puredyne. While > there is no point in keeping this list running, we want to ask you all > if you would be interested to join a new list to keep on > talking/discussing about the practice of free software related art, > music and design (get help on installing and using distros and free > software for artistic practices, but also a place to announce/present > your projects, look for collaborators, etc). No strings attached, just > an idea, but one that may be useful for users/former users of Puredyne > - based around our initial goal to support FLOSS + art practice for > ourselves and others, where we saw a gap that needed filling. Send a > mail off-list to puredyne-t...@goto10.org. If we get a few positive > responses we'll make a list and subscribe those who contacted us. > > I think that's it for now. > > Puredyne was a great project, we learned a lot, we had great fun. We > thank you all for supporting us and having been around all these > years. > > :* > --- > Puredyne@goto10.org > http://identi.ca/group/puredyne > irc://irc.goto10.org/puredyne > --- Puredyne@goto10.org http://identi.ca/group/puredyne irc://irc.goto10.org/puredyne
