Center

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Revision as of 17:05, 20 November 2013 by Ivan denisov (talk | contribs) (Rene draft added)
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The "Blackbox Center" is the non-profit voluntarily association dedicated to the mission, the vision and the values of Blackbox Center. Today, it is a de facto board of self-organized BlackBox developers, users and potential project managers. In the future, it could be necessary to transform the Center to a single entity, in order to provide better legacy basis for framework support, accumulation of donations and limitation of potential legal exposure of single project members. The members spearhead projects that, through a collaborative and meritocratic development process deliver enterprise-grade freely available software products that attract large communities of users. We operate under BSD 2-clause license to deploy our product to make it easy for commercial and individual usage.

Vision

The mission of the Blackbox Center is to provide software for the public good, based on the spirit, philosophy and technology put forth by Nicklaus Wirth and Jörg Gutknecht in the Project Oberon (the "Oberon Spirit". We do this by keeping alive, adapting and developing Component Pascal, Blackbox Framework and Blackbox Component Builder starting with the last official release (V 1.6) provided by Oberon Microsystems AG (the "software") and growing and maintaining an international user community.

Mission

The Blackbox Center provides and ensures guidelines and policies to keep the community centered around the vision described above. As such, we are not the sole developers of the software, nor the only providers of the software, but we provide a clearing house to centralize efforts.

Values

As a community we strive to

  • Cooperate for the common good,
  • Make things as simple as possible but not simpler
  • Use the idea of component building, that is to let everybody add what he is good at to form something more than the sum of the parts.
  • Work democratically and meritocratically
  • Be good citizens

How are the Blackbox Center and its projects governed?

Currently, the 10 members decide issues by vote, with 80% constituting a quorum. Every vote needs the options "none of the above". Such a vote is counted for the quorum, but it does not take a side. For an option to be accepted, it needs 51% of the quorum.

Votes are called by the Chairman only (who is elected by vote on a yearly basis), whose responsibility it is

  • to start a voting thread after sufficient prior discussion;
  • to make sure that each member is informed about pending votes (at least about important questions);
  • to make sure that each member voted
  • to close the voting thread

New members can be added by vote, if necessary.

Contributions to the software come from the wider community, and the Center members decide which additions are added, and when, in compliance with our mission, our vision and our values.


Visions of development for the software

Keeping alive

  • All parts of the software are documented both in source and in an overview document (no “this module is internal” documentations!)
  • All OS function calls are checked regularily and if necessary changed so that the software does not use deprecated functions.
  • Known bugs are fixed
  • There are regular “working releases” and once a year or so there are “major releases”, to make sure that the user can rely on the stability of the software.


Adapting

Blackbox is now 10 years old, and the world has changed. We need to adapt.

  • Providing a 64-bit version of the software
  • Adapting to the changed native look and feel of the OS
  • Internationalization of user documentation and user interface
  • Implementation of additional GUI elements provided by the OS as part of the standard distribution


Developing

Source-Code compatible versions with local look-and-feel for

  • Mac OS
  • Linux
  • JVM
  • Dalvik VM
  • .NET
  • Raspbian…

Looking beyond our noses

  • When Wirth designed Oberon System, he discouraged multi-tasking on single processor systems, because it only adds complexity (i.e. it is against the values). Over 20 years later, most of our systems are multi-processor systems. Is the current handling of “Actions” still the best practice, or should be implement – in the spirit of Oberon – multi-threading, and if so, how? For instance, we are faced with the problem that the Runtime System freezes when you keep a mouse key pressed. Is this really necessary, and how can we solve this in the Oberon Spirit?
  • Are there new paradigms of user interaction in software development that we could (and probably should) integrate, like for instance MS IntelliSense? Is it inherently against the Oberon Spirit, or are there ways to provide similar functionality in keeping the Spirit?


Center tasks

  • to make first version version with all known bugfixes
  • to maintain stable versions of BlackBox Component Builder
  • provide it's distribution and promotion.

To maintain means:

  • regularly (period?) publish new versions of the BlackBox Component Builder;
  • support the international BlackBox open-source community;
  • adapt the BlackBox Component Builder to modern challenges.