After all these months I am playing with the thoughts to maybe leave the MorphOS community again (this means the entire Amiga community). But all this will be decided once I am back from my vacation from greece (21.08.2004 - 25.09.2004).

I've been a bit worried about the future of MorphOS, the silence around it, the development material there exist and the applications that people write an offer. But basicly this isn't a MorphOS issue per se since the OS is quite cool it's more the remaining normal developers who work on Amiga, AROS and MorphOS stuff, the lack of standards, the lack of scientific work on software which bothers me.

Please allow me to write ahead and please do not feel insulted or offended but I think that writing this one time is necessary for people to understand the problems that I see and the keyproblems we need to work on.

We all know that Amiga has stagnated for many years and that we also lost quite a lot of powerful real developers. People who nowadays do professional work on either Linux, Windows, MacOS or wherever and what remains nowadays are a handful of people with different skills, different ideals, different views and different approaches of doing things. From most people that I met in the past months I can say that they are some sort of 'one person rambos' lack of co-operation, lack of teamwork, lack of professionalism, unwillingness for a change for the future and the better, strange attempts of software design. This is not because of their skills or something. I think it might be a bit lack of manpower or coordination because there is so much that needs to be done but not many people are available who are willing to do all the work. Then money and private life is also an issue.

Problem with AmigaOS are the people, so many "experts", so many "know it betters", so many hatred conversations, so many different views, impossible to even talk, convince or having these people accept compromises or work in teams to achive a goal faster and better, things to be re-invented 20000 times, 20 types of the same approach and all 20 suck more or less ... And here are the core problems I think.

I stare on this architecture, looking back to my good old Amiga days and I sit here asking myself why I waste my time with all this and this community.

Let's switch over to the open source world for one moment. See at the KDE architecture. People found together, creating a nice framework, where you build your tools on it and when you look behind the IRC names of these people you mostly find physicans, computer scientists, people with a doctor title, normal users, some companies who back the stuff up with financial money, hardware, resources so people can work on and can keep motivated working on it. People with a clear idea and clear roadmap how things have to look. Due to the perfect framework like mimesystem, like vfs layer, like object system, like component system, unified toolkit, themes and so on you are able to write powerful applications for all types of areas, sound, video, 3d, graphic, unified window creating, unified components like toolbars, menus, etc..

On Amiga (specially MorphOS now) we are trying to convince people to go for one GUI system which here is MUI and we try to convince people to write proper code, re-usable code and so on and follow some sort of styling guide for the applications.

But I also noticed that many of these suggestions are not paid the attention that it really requires. I see people using different Toolbar classes for a MUI application which makes the applications behave differently and less pleasing when using them, I realize that people use different entries for Menu. e.g. Some use Quit in their first Menu entry, and some use Quit in their last Menu entry, some have About in their first Menu entry some in the last and so on. Also noticed that different applications have different keysequences for the same thing which totally confuses people. Then again some apps look like they are blown together in a hurry and their GUI looks like that as well. Different padding for button, some apps come even with own colorschema for MUI, or own different Font for the Buttons or the GUI itself when loading these apps and normal apps they do look differently even if they use the same GUI system. Looking at the translations (catalog) files is also painful by times where you see some people translate "wallpaper" with "tapete" or "hintergrund" e.g. using multiple different terminology for the same thing which only increases the glossary unnecessarily. Also a problem is having people do their own 20 ways of reading and storing configurations which then appear in either PROGDIR: S: ENVARC: then some of them are plain textfiles, some of them are tooltypes some of them iff files and so on and this is plain insane and not something that is visionaire for the future. Also some Toolbar elements are in IFF, others in PNG, others in GIF ... different graphicans and different look of these things make the entire use of the apps unpleasing. Different own custom routines for doing stuff rather than using what's offered by the system, hacks, half solutions and so on.