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Ask Slashdot: Attracting Developers To Abandonware?
phlawed writes "I've been a Linux user since the previous millennium. I came from OS/2, which I really liked. I quickly felt at home with icewm, using a suitably tweaked config to give me something resembling Presentation Manager. I may have commented on that before. Today, I find myself in a position where my preferred 'environment' is eroding. The only force keeping icewm rolling these days is the distribution package maintainers. I can't code in any meaningful way, nor do I aspire to. I could easily pay for a supported version of icewm, but I can't personally pay someone enough to keep it alive. I'd love it if someone took a personal interest in the code, to ensure that it remains up to date, or to make it run on Wayland or whatever. I want someone to own the code, be proud of it. Is there a general solution for this situation? How do I go about drumming up interest for an old project?"
Sure you can. Find someone to work on it and get them to sign up for Gittip, while you do the same. You can "tip" them a few cents to several bucks per week for their efforts and they can get paid by you and other supporters.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
While on the topic about fragmentation... Android is another type of linux.
c++;
Sorry but thats just how it is, even in the Linux world. You can't relive the past. You gotta move on to newer things. Just look at my screen handle; I've learned this lesson myself. Don't waste time hoping it will make a comeback because it won't; not as long as there's a surplus of people willing to complain about how old and obsolete it is, and not as long as there's no significant payoff to be made.
What's keeping this layout from being re-implemented on any other window manager?
Determine if there's sufficient demand for your preferred environment to grow and be maintained, sufficient to pay the salaries for a small dedicated team. If you can't code, perhaps you can manage the project or handle the marketing. If the demand isn't there, you may have to deal with the situation as is, or transition to another platform.
Plan My Week for iPhone
http://dooblet.com/alternative-to-icewm
http://alternativeto.net/software/icewm/
http://linux.descargargratis.co/icewm/alternatives
Timeo idiotikOS et dona ferentes
By that metric Playstation 4 is another type of BSD, so I guess it's the same as using linux, right?
...and a family-sized bag of Cheetos ought to do the trick.
www.chihuahuarescue.com- Help to end dog abuse, abandonment and cruelty
I'm an OS/2 refugee.
There are parts of KDE that seem much closer to WPS than the other environments. For example, right clicking in Dolphin and "Create New" to make a new blank object is similar to Workplace Shell's templates.
The only parts of icewm that are similar to WPS is the coloring and button layout.
None of the environments on Linux, Windows, or OSX are like the WPS "object oriented user interface." To understand what this is like you have to actually have used OS/2. Everyone else has no idea.
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BMO
I have a mod stalker who is modding down my past comments and is too much of a cowardly pussy to admit it or face me.
No, you get modded down because you say idiotic things like this:
Now you know why 90% of FLOSS projects are crap.
Implying that this is different in closed source software. This is false. 90 percent of closed-source software is crap too. Sturgeon's Law applies everywhere.
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BMO
While on the topic about fragmentation... Android is another type of linux.
No, its not. End users and nearly all **developers** don't see it. The Linux kernel could probably be swapped out with a BSD kernel and few would notice. Even for those using the NDK and writing some C code they are probably making POSIX calls not calls to anything Linux specific.
You might want to check into a class of crowdfunding sites that exist to fund features in free and open source software. The two main ones I could find are:
https://www.bountysource.com/
https://bountyoss.com/
"Hey guys, I really love your software... I'd be totally unwilling to pay for it, but I'd really love it if you did all of this work for me, thanks." The problem with the Linux software ecosystem is that it does not run on gratitude alone, as much as some of the users would love to think that it does.
In truth, Linux is largely subsidized by various commercial corporation. If it had remained a hobbyist effort it would be far far behind where it is today.
No, it's the same as running BSD :P
I'm not too interested in an escrow service, but personally I liked tvtwm enough I might join a bounty program to bring it back into the mainstream.
I'd gladly toss a few bucks to fund a bounty to get it back into a major distro.
Well, BSD generally attracks fewer developes than GPL, and you need to own the copyright to change the license, but outside of that it's a reasonable idea.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Not precisely. He doesn't think of himself as the only user. Micropayments is a perfectly reasonable model, that has just never taken off. Pertially because there's usually so much overhead to managing them. And THAT is partially because of legal constraints.
OTOH, please note that I did say "partially". There are other reasons that it hasn't taken off, and the "free rider" problem is one of them. There's no obvious way around that. But someone *might* find a way if the legal obstacles were removed, and the overhead were lower.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It's called marketing. RubyOnRails wasn't the first web framework and it certainly wasn't the best. In fact, it was pretty shitty. But it was the first that had a professionally designed website that advertised its benefits and a screencast that explained and demonstraded them. The pratically invented screencasts. Weeks later slashdot was filled with Rails fanatics.
The first version of the Zope Webapp Server came out roughly a decade before rails and still was notabliy superiour to any other WebFW, Rails included, in all aspects. Yet nobody cared. Why? That's why. Bland website? Nothing flashy? Can't find what I'm looking for? Backend UI without good looking buttons? Won't adhere to the loudmouths and hippsters and won't get attention, won't get critical mass, will lose eventually. It's that simple, even in the FOSS world nowadays (Rails actually sought to that, btw.)
If you really want to bring ICEwm (back) into the limelight, join the team, update their 12 year old website, bundle a new version with good looking modern themes and your tweaked setup, give it a new version number and do a little rattling on related online forums. Once everything is in place, tested, up and running that is. If you've done your job well, userbase will rise again and IceWM 2.0 will the the Hip WM of 2014. Fluxbox, a Blackbox fork, gained hippness status some years back the exact same way. Neat website, one or two nice little extras, screenshots, a well kempt miniblog and everybody went "Oh, look, new and shiny."
That's just about all there is to it. But don't you dare think good marketing isn't work and isn't worth giving as much thought as your projects software architecture. It's more work and - most of the time - even more important than that for the success of a project. Even in FOSS.
Good luck.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I use icewm pretty regularly on some machines. It hasn't changed in years, and I like it that way.
Is there actually anything that needs doing?
Lotus died a long time ago. Everyone on the planet uses Acrobat for electronic forms. Yet the US Government requires you to use crappy Lotus-based forms. Not only that, you have to submit them with Internet Explorer on Windows due to a crappy digital signature implementation that only works on IE and Windows. So, if you want keep an obsolete technology around, hire a lobbyist.
That's utterly inane attention-grubbing bullshit that needs to stop because it makes all of us look bad. Linux is not GNU/Linux any more than Windows is "GNU/Windows" after you install Cygwin. Do you use the Cerf/Internet every day, and sometimes drive a Lenoir/Car? What did you have for Albertson's/Lunch?
If you want evidence, just look at the high profile projects that have had annoying little bugs that lasted for months or even years because hunting down the bug and fixing it would be boring.
You mean like Windows itself?
Your argument is nonsense.
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BMO
You make this point yourself. If the developer of a closed source package gets bored of it, or it is not profitable (which itself is a high bar for a most producers!), or both, they will drop it. Anyone who came to rely on it is completely stuck, as they cannot fix the most trivial or sexy bugs. They have to live with it until advancing technology and other changes make the program fail completely, and they will have to retrain.
If it is open source, then at least you can recompile and/or port to a new OS. You have the option of paying someone to fix a problem. You have none of those options if the closed-source producer of a package arbitrarily decides to drop it.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
I still doesn't have a builtin mail client :)
On the plus side jwm has seen quite a bit of development recently.
Linux is not GNU/Linux any more than Windows is "GNU/Windows" after you install Cygwin.
That is an intellectually dishonest comparison. The more accurate comparison is "MS/Windows to GNU/Linux" - basically all of the userland on Windows depends on MS code. Similarly pretty much all of Linux userland depends on GNU code - gcc and glibc have practically 100% coverage for Linux userland's dependency on GNU software without having to get into the nitty-gritty details of exactly what other GNU software is in a typical distribution.
I'm not particularly in favor of GNU/Linux as a term but I'm not particularly against it either. Right now, in this post, what I am against is bogus arguments either way.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Indeed. The problem is finding enough icewm users to fund a programmer to do maintenance on it. What the OP really ought to be doing is not looking for someone to work on icewm, but for fellow users.
It's properly referred to as Free Cell/Windows.
-Dave
"Right now, in this post, what I am against is bogus arguments either way."
And you did that quite well.
(And if there was a big meta-package I could install on Windows to add all the GNU tools, ported and compiled for Windows, THEN I might talk about GNU/Windows. I keep waiting for someone to package up ReactOS like that to support netbooks, but I digress.)
And btw, I think a big part of why Stallman draws a red line on his terminology here is out of fear of exactly the sort of deliberate confusion that was used above us in this thread. 'Android is linux' is technically true, but since so many people hear 'linux' and think of a fully functioning GNU OS that happens to use linux as the kernel, it's very (deliberately) misleading. Android is really little if any more open than OSX. Both exploit a free kernel by hooking it into unfree userland and incorporating unfree drivers without which it is no longer functional.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
First, a short background: I played with OS/2 Warp for a really short time, but had a lot of things to do and then Linux came. So, no cigar here.
I have a couple computers -- the most powerful run KDE4(Mageia); for the weaker/older I've been experimenting with Xfce and LXDE and since the latter will use Qt, I'll probably use it where KDE is not possible.
Finally, for really weak machines I've been trying some simpler distros. Porteus is incredible nimble, but I'd rather have a Debian-based distro. Which led me to...
antiX: a distro which can use a selection of window managers, iceWM included. I'd recommend that you try jwm, as others already said, 'cause I found it to be configurable to my taste (btw, I don't click a window to raise it; I click its title... that is because I may want to work with a certain window disposition and even paste things on a window I don't want to bring up and wreck my desktop layout).
Now, what I don't get:
If you got an older machine (or are helping lots of people in need like Ken from Reglue/Helios), ok, I recommend jwm by Joe Wing if you really need to stick to something akin to icewm.
If you got a decent machine, depending on its age, I'd suggest waiting for LXDE-Qt and perhaps using Xfce in the mean time... it can be tweaked to look like iceWM (though I have no idea about OS/2's capabilities).
Or, better yet, go for KDE4. It can be configured to work like mostly anything... from Windows (yuck!) to OS X... though the ride is not without emotions. Here the problem is the opposite: "how can I make those KDE developers stay put and don't change things so fast, or at least be better at marketing the new features?").
I don't get why you don't want a desktop, since a desktop can be made to work just like a window manager (for the most cases, at least). I've seen your comment explaining it, but certainly you don't think icons are mandatory in KDE (or Gnome, btw)...
And, btw, iceWM is nice. It's development slowed, maybe, because it already attained perfection. Why are you worried about it?
It's frightening how plausible that sounds.
rephrase: i really want hollywood to make "throw momma from the train 2: grandma!" I cannot afford to bankroll the whole movie but I will happily buy a ticket when this comes out in theaters. how can I make this happen?
I was originally just going to say this to be a dick, but in rephrasing the question I think we see the answer. Look at the story behind Veronica Mars 2. It was fans who pushed for it and ultimately funded it through KS. The lesson here: even though Hollywood was apathetic, fans won out because of their collective ferver.
solution for @phlawed: build a rabid fanbase. Don't worry about the coders, worry about the users. the coders will come.
Of course, if you don't have the time / inclination to work towards this goal, and nobody else wants to do it either, then you're @phucked!
I wonder if phlawed subscribed to https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/icewm-user whether he might then be able to send out a request for members willing to kick in towards paying a maintainer. With enough users they might also have fewer hops than six-degrees towards finding one.
Actually i was going to suggest that if he can get the code modular enough and organized enough he ight search for universities that insist that students complete some sort of independent project before getting their degree, then seeing if he can get the students and faculty interested.
Sorry, but "Anonymous Cowards" are not allowed to use the "I" pronoun. There is no "I" there.
Unless you're an "Anonymous Coward" from Apple. You know, iAC? :-)
That's extreme, do you anticipate there really be enough work to maintain IceWM every single working day? I think asking for $4000/year and taking on 30 low-volume projects would be a better strategy. Next, expand and hire employees. Some of low use projects got to be commercially important for the one org that is using them.
I run Windows XP and Windows 7
Same kernel right?
http://saveie6.com/
I'm sorry I can't give any good advise on how to save icemw. What I can do is give you some reasons why an Open Source developer might be interested in developing a project... You can then try to find a marketing angle that appeals to one of these: 1. At the root of all open source development is the desire to do one of two things: (A) Build a tool of profound use to self and/or others. (B) Build one's skills and/or resume. Unfortunately, desktop management systems are an innovation that we've moved beyond. Today the "wild west" is in HTML5 cloud computing, wearable devices (mobile in general), etc. Sometimes an old technology will get lucky and be used as a building-block to something new and upcoming. What makes icewm so useful? How is it useful in the context of things on the "cutting-edge" today? If you can't answer that in a meaningful way then you may need to face the fact that change is a fundamental (and sometimes sad) part of the computer industry.