I have peeked over to the AROS code for a while and saw that there are quite a lot of nice Open Source (and Free Software) projects maintained in their 'contribute' repository but after all it's just AROS who largely benefit from this. Not the rest.

I would like to give an example here (Directory Opus 4). In the past there were 3-4 different attempts to continue working on Directory Opus 4. Trying to fix the code, improve it and release new versions. Imo this is a very very nice idea and the right idea too but nobody is really helped that way besides those whose target system is supported only with that. This means people start to grab the software and make individual forks of it and some of the people don't feel the need or urge to forward the changes to the maintainer so we all can benefit from it. There are usually 3-4 attempts of one Software to be forked and worked on, which causes a lot of maintainance and problems on the long run.

I would therefore like to ask whether we can get along somehow and start hosting good Open Source (and Free Software) projects on serious locations such as SourceForge or Savvanah and start working on it in a normal way. That is make sure it works on AROS, MorphOS and AmigaOS4. So whenever something gets changed, we all benefit from it. Unfortunately this means that we should start to learn to co-operate here and not hide the changes we made like it was something secret or magic. We need to learn that we have to give back something to those who gave us all this great Open Source software we benefit from. And we do benefit largely from it. But it's really sad to see all the fragmentation showing up. All the little cut out projects where people start hacking on, then losing interests, then someone else splits the project etc. We need to organize ourselves much better here and start pumping that stuff on the right locations and work nicely on it.

A neutral repository where we can work on the stuff like GNOME and KDE does, they have one big CVS repository where they have pumped all the Open Source stuff on and where people who are interested start working on it. Working in a way so everyone can benefit from it - not just AROS. When we commit changes to say Dopus4 then we should all benefit from it.

I know with Dopus4 that's just one example there are other examples as well... I think you got the message here.

I have been talking with some AROS developers and they heartly welcome this. It's not just for them, it's also for us and for me personally I don't care where the location of the software is as long as we can work together on it so improvements can be shared between all Amiga compatible systems.

Feedback is welcome here. Please make sure you read my comment and reply on MorphZone specially my second reply there (last paragraph). I know there are some attempts to reach something similar already. There are a lot of fine developers who have similar stuff in mind. But we should really start to organize more and not duplicate the work.

greetings,

oGALAXYo