Site News :: The Future of DSL



A note about what's transpiring between Robert and myself: As you may recall, there was a heated debate between the DSL community and JohnMurga over our use of John's code.  If you want to relive the painful experience, you may read it here:

http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....99;st=0
http://damnsmalllinux.org/cgi-bin....03;st=0

What happened behind the scenes was that Robert and I had a long conversation about how we would reach out to John and see if we were able come up with a solution that would satisfy him while keeping our hacked version of murgaLUA inside DSL.

As you know, much of our applications were based on murgaLUA, as it is a very good fit for our project.  It is fast and capable while our hacked version was relatively compact.  Over the years, hundreds of hours were poured into our LUA scripts, and it seemed a waste to have to do such an about face or risk lawsuits.  Robert and I had an in-depth conversation about this before I started the second thread above.  We both agreed that it was worth swallowing a little pride in order to continue development.

Of course many in the community were incensed and thought it was unnecessary to capitulate.   To me, it was relatively easy to comply with John's requests, and then we could more on.

As you can see in the second thread, we DID come up with a solution that was agreeable to John and kept murgaLUA in DSL.  I thought all was well and good.   Then, as you can see Robert blew his top and then locked down the thread -- effectively destroying our agreement.  This was done without my consent. Whether or not John was in the right was irrelevant; we had agreed to seek out a compromise.

After he blew up at John, I emailed Robert (too upset to talk on the phone) and told him that I was very frustrated.  He never replied back to me.  I tried to communicate with him a second time but I never heard from him again.

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Some notes:
We had plans to turn DSL-core into the foundation for the second generation of DSL.  
Robert was not a DSL volunteer, but was in fact paid monthly for development time.
I continued to pay him despite the lack of communication.
I didn't know I was paying Robert to take the code base of DSL's future and create a new solo project.  
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Apparently, some time in April, Robert decided to pull DSL-core, rename it and recruit some capable members of our community to develop tiny core away from the DSL project.  He was doing this while cashing the checks and would continue to deposit the checks for several more months.

Because of the feud between Robert and John Murga, DSL development was greatly limited.  No major release was possible without losing much of DSL's functionality or implementing a different code base which would effectively erase hundreds of hours of labor.  Because of the dispute over the code, all that has emerged from DSL during the last several months has been minor bug fixes.

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What will the future be?

Here's where I see the project going...

I believe we are close to the limit of perfecting the 50MB distribution.  I'll update the project with a modern kernel and newer software.  Without feature reduction, it would be impossible to stay within the constraints of 50MB.  So, I'm thinking a 100MB limit will be the new bucket size.

In general, I am very proud of how much the project has developed and changed over the past five years.  I also have great respect for Robert's ingenuity and skill, and regret that we will no longer be working together.  I appreciate your support and patience.  I welcome and encourage active participation from all members and look forward to DSL's continued growth.

Before we tackle the kernel challenges I'm going to wrestle with updating the  larger applications.  First thing I'm looking into is updating the browser.

original here.