Unix Porting Project to seek UK admin

By Chris Williams. Published: 6th Jun 2005, 10:41:16 | Permalink | Printable

Firefox pledge-o-meter launched

Peter Naulls, of the Unix Porting Project, has revealed that he is seeking a UK based project administrator to take over the day to day running of his porting initiative.

Peter will be heading for the soaring temperatures of California, USA, ditching overcast Cambridgeshire, in pursuit of "a real job" in time for August this year. Whilst waiting for his immigration Visa to arrive, Peter told UPP subscribers over the weekend that his move away from Europe is in order "to pursue a real job, meet family requirements, and enjoy significantly larger income than I could ever hope to get out of doing RISC OS work, as well as attempt to recoup the significant costs I've incurred by pursuing so much RISC OS work in the past few years."

Owing to the fact that his time will soon be limited, Peter says his project will need someone willing to manage and collect subscriptions, represent the project at most RISC OS events as well as user group meetings, and produce CDs of software ported to RISC OS. Anyone interested should contact Peter.

Peter also confirmed today that this month's Big Ben Club show in The Netherlands will be his last RISC OS show for "quite some time".

Playing with fire
As work continues on the Firefox port, Peter has also created a 'Pledge-O-Meter' which shows how many more pledges of cash he needs before a first beta release of the open source web browser is made available. If the gauge reaches 100 percent, he says the software will be published on CD in time for the Big Ben Club show, on June 18th, and for download afterwards.

You may also have noticed that Peter temporarily withdrew his website of open source software and resources over the weekend. The take down came after his essay on how to post correctly to Usenet and mailing lists backfired when a small number of the newsgroups' contributors vented their strong feelings on being lectured by Peter. The flamefest drew mixed criticism and support from developers and users, and amongst the usual Usenet banter, "The Peter Naulls Appreciation Society" was founded in response to the removal of riscos.info. One adoring fan gushed: "We will be publishing daily updates on our campaign which aims to ensure his commitment to the RISC OS world."

Links

Peter's riscos.info website Peter Naulls is a Drobe.co.uk contributor

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Discussion

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I for one (and I am sure others will agree) wish Peter the very best of good fortune and every success in his new job.

It's unfortunate the things transpired as they did. I've managed to read Peter's article (cached) and I must admit I can't see what all the fuss was about (certainly nothing that anyone should have been upset about).

Anyway, again, Peter thanks for all the work you've done over the years - hope you succeed in your new endeavour and I hope someday that you'll make a welcome return to the RISC OS community - till then best of luck.

AMS on 6/6/05 1:31PM
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It really does smart badly to see fallout in this way in the small community we're all a part of.

Just this time last year we nearly saw CTL and ROL fighting to the death of RISC OS, and then so soon after such an upbeat Wakefield show where Peter's stand was one of the busiest and his browser presentation was well-attended, the whole thing was potentially nearly called off after a petty name-calling exercise that erupted out of all proportion.

This market is too fragile to let a few poorly thought-out comments have such a lasting effect on our platform.

Kudos to Peter for making sure from the outset that his UPP work maintains a UK presence in his absence, and best wishes for the new job. Let's hope it still leaves him enough time - and goodwill - to continue bringing much needed software to RISC OS.

As for the Peter Naulls Appreciation Society, I assume it is due to a deliferate mistale that the poster has misspelled Peter's name

tamias on 6/6/05 1:50PM
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Good luck in the US Peter. But one thing, is your immigration visa assured? I hear it's done by lottery or something?

The RISC OS scene is gonna be a bit poorer.

sascott on 6/6/05 3:49PM
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Completly OT: The US Visa process is very involved, and I'd really prefer not speculate about my private life.

mrchocky on 6/6/05 3:55PM
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Sorry for the OT Peter.

sascott on 6/6/05 4:08PM
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Ha - many years ago I had a job lined up with Westinghouse, got me a 'Green Card' and then I won this lottery thingy, and 6 months later I had my draft cards and an invitation to Vietnam....

Needless to say I didn't take up the offer!!!

Eddie on 6/6/05 5:40PM
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My best wishes Peter. I will miss buying the latest UPP CD from you at various shows.

ron. on 6/6/05 6:25PM
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Blast. The UK brain drain continues. If you have second thoughts you know where to come/stay!

AW on 6/6/05 9:06PM
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In reply to sascott: The RISCOS scene is NOT a bit poorer, the RISCOS scene is more expanding now, PN is spreading the word RISC OS in the USA !!! Think once: USA people wanna know more about RISC OS !!!

datawave on 6/6/05 11:28PM
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Best of luck with your "real job" Peter, though it is a pity that our RISC OS platform isn't strong enough to support your huge input. However, California is a bit closer to New Zealand than the UK for me. RISC OS needs to become thought of as a more worldwide computer system ;-)

Sawadee on 6/6/05 11:45PM
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I think it takes considerable personal sacrifice to do what Peter (not forgetting our other developers) has done for RISC OS, and we should remember that. As a professional software engineer myself, I doubt I could make as good a living working on RISC OS as I do in my present job. With the job and my other spare time interests, I find I get very little time for RISC OS programming (at this moment for example, I haven't touched my current RISC OS programming project for three months). After all, after a hard days programming at the office, the last thing you feel like doing when you get home is more programming! I hope that that doesn't happen to Peter to the same extent, but it is clear that he will not be able to continue to produce software for RISC OS at his present rate. But we need the UPP to continue and I hope that someone will be able to take on the UK Admin task. Thank you Peter, and I wish you success in your new job.

mrtd on 7/6/05 9:11AM
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I doubt anyone could make a living from RISC OS software, in the long term. At the recent Wakefield show, my first for five years, I was amazed how reticent 'users' were in spending very little money for major applications. RISC OS users must surely be aware that it is they who must support the market by actually buying software, before the author throws in the towel and gives it away (I'm not suggesting Peter is throwing in the towel).

RISC OS users must also be RISC OS buyers for this market to have anything more than a couple of years left in it. And this must be regardless of hardware, it is software that people run, new hardware is nice, but without software, it's useless.

demondb on 7/6/05 10:43AM
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Indeed look at BeOS a really nice operating system but the lack of software eventually killed it off

highlandcattle on 7/6/05 10:49AM
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demonb:

I totally agree with what you say. Given the amount of time developers spend for the amount of return they get, RISC OS users generally get a bargain when it comes to software in my opinion.

Unfortunately this doesn't mean people have any more money to spend. For example there are a number of pieces of software and hardware that I'd like to buy, but since I can't justifiably afford them all it's necessary to prioritise. Maybe this is why people were reticent at Wakefield?

flypig on 7/6/05 11:37AM
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Additionally, I'd like to wish Peter well with his new endeavours. I'm sure he will have much success, but in this Internet Age, I hope it won't mean his exit from the RISC OS scene, even if he can't attend the shows any more.

flypig on 7/6/05 11:50AM
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I think you'll find that BeOS is at least as active as RISC OS. Certainly far more people have heard of it, and it runs natively on commodity hardware to boot. Plus it has a large range of modern applications that RISC OS doesn't.

If you assert that BeOS was "killed off", then you'll have to say the same about RISC OS and AmigaOS. A quick web search or look on places like OSNews shows that this isn't true.

mrchocky on 7/6/05 12:05PM
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I agree that BeOS hasn't been killed off, but in some sense you could argue that a big difference between BeOS and RISC OS is that the latter is commercially available, whereas (unless I missed it) there is no recent, available and useable "current" version of BeOS.

Just for general interest, there's an interesting article about the history of BeOS here: [link]

I find the similarities between RISC OS and BeOS a bit surprising.

flypig on 7/6/05 12:51PM
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www.yellowtab.com sell and develop BeOS, apparently they have sold 80,000 copies.

thegman on 7/6/05 2:49PM
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thegman:

Yeah, but I don't think it's yet reached 1.0, so these are really beta or pre-releases.

I could be wrong about this, but that's the impression that I got from the yellotab website.

flypig on 7/6/05 3:00PM
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Heh. 80,000 copies and they haven't made it to 1.0 yet? You've got to wonder what they're spending the money on!

adamr on 7/6/05 3:40PM
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On the other hand, are BeOS and AmigaOS still being developed in the way that RISC OS is?

fwibbler on 7/6/05 4:18PM
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"Completly OT: The US Visa process is very involved, and I'd really prefer not speculate about my private life."

What?! You released that information to start with.

arenaman on 7/6/05 4:27PM
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arenaman: Actually(?1) no, I didn't. Even if I had, it's still off topic. Unless I'm mistaken, this isn't Heat magazine.

The actual PR I released for drobe (and csa.announce) contained more pertinent information such as that I would contribute excess pledges to other deserving developers.

Information about my visa process and details of what an admin might have to do were intended for subscribers only. Sadly, Chris insisted on publishing this information despite asking him not to.

mrchocky on 7/6/05 4:58PM
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Amiga OS is owned by Amiga Inc and is being developped by a German/belgian company called Hyperion the latest version is 0S4 (still beta) i believe the Newest hardware is an Amiga One with G4 powerpc processor (same as in macintosh) it is produced by a british company Eyetech and is sold around the world.I'd say that the Amiga market is actually in a pretty good state and stable at the moment with new software and games.

highlandcattle on 7/6/05 5:40PM
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I take back my words I've been reading up and it seems that not an awfull lot of people are buying the new Amiga's and it has a lot of problems. here is a Amiga portal : [link]

highlandcattle on 7/6/05 6:51PM
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What a mess:

[link]

There are a lot of parallels to be drawn between Acorn and Commodore development and the things that happened after the companies vanished: very popular 8-bit platform, later more powerful machines, loyal user base, vanshining market in the face of dominance by Wintel, etc, etc.

But these latest developments make RISC OS dramas of the last few years look like a walk in the park. And consider that the Amiga user base is much larger (with UK _and US users). Count yourself lucky that there is relatively modern RISC OS hardware available and that people are willing and able to purchase it.

mrchocky on 7/6/05 7:23PM
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For me the main difference betweeen other alternative systems and RISC OS is, that RISC OS actually is a very productive system with lots of stable software and a good user interface. Every other system I have tried, lacks at least one of these.

JGZimmerle on 7/6/05 8:12PM
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I've jJst checked out... "The Peter Naulls Appreciation Society" ... via the link in the above article.

Most amusing and great to see a good sense of humour prevailing after the sillyness on Usenet. (Reported and commented upon at length on The Icon Bar)

Best wishes with the new job, Peter.

martin on 7/6/05 9:08PM
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Returning the topic at hand, the Pledge-O-Meter has had a good start, but still needs support from those who haven't pledged yet. It would certainly be a shame to let our Dutch hosts down.

It also seems that the Amiga people have a similar project, although much less close to release:

[link]

mrchocky on 8/6/05 9:53PM
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... and if anyone reading this can draw like Eric Shwartz, I think that the RISC OS community could really do with a cute mascot. Possibly versions with /and/ without large bosoms, to cater for everyone.

krisa on 8/6/05 10:42PM
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Who will get the subscription money for the UPP? Is it shared amongst developers? What about Firefox?

AW on 11/06/05 4:25PM
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