[Oberon] more attention and a larger community?

greim greim at schleibinger.com
Sun May 4 20:16:24 CEST 2014


>> I absolute agree.
>>
>> BUT first i think its important to clarify the license question. For me
>> its still not clear what the license for Wirths and Gutknechts Oberon
>> is. The same story with Paul Reeds Verilog code.
>> Wirth said, as far as i understood, its free. But what is free?
>> Free to copy, free to use in a non commercial project, free to change
>> it.....
>> So maybe Wirth, Gutknecht and Reed should give a statement if their code
>> is free under the MIT license or GPL or any other common model.
>> I would prefer MIT but GPL would be ok for me too.
> yes, this question is essential. without an liberal license
> "ProjectOberon" is lost.
>
>> - the best way to make the project Oberon more popular
>> would be an article in the Elektor, c't or Circuit Cellar or any similar
>> magazine. For this, not only the FPGA board, but also a practical
>> application should be shown. With Prof. Wirth as author / co-author it
>> should be no problem to get some pages in the c't (circulation of
>> 250.000+ )
> good idea, i would help to write an article for the c't. even the
> current status
> of the project should be interessting.
>
>> - but before, as most important task, we should implement a SD-RAM
>> interface in the Verilog code. Otherwise the "deprecated Spartan-3
>> board" story will come up and up again. (maybe i will try it in the next
>> months)
> there should be a plan for the next step. i would support such a project.
>
>> - All this ProjectOberon, ETHOberon, NativeOberon, Aos, Bluebottle,
>> NativeOberon etc. its extreme confusing.
>> So i would suggest to change the name of the project from ProjectOberon
>> to FPGAOberon or FPGAProjectOberon or so. The real highlight of this
>> project is FPGA+Oberon. That make it total different from RaspberryPi,
>> Arduinio, BeagleBoard etc.
> it is confusing. currently i see only "ProjectOberon 2013" and "Aos"
> with some life. I would prefer to keep
> to name "ProjectOberon" and it should support two platforms: FPGA and a
> Emulation/VirtualMachine.
>
> A reactivation of ETHOberon would also be nice. Maybe "ProjectOberon"
> and some of the "ETHOberon" work
> can be merged into one "System Oberon" some day (when ProjectOberon has
> cought up). But i am not
> sure, what here makes sense.

yes, i guess we agree all that should clean up the Oberon jungle in anyway


>
>> By the way, i will publish a Free-Pascal translation of Peter de
>> Wachters RISC emulator in the next days.... after i have done a lot of
>> housekeeping in my source code ;-), or, as NW said on his birthday
>> conference (topic 3 on the last slide): "...Writing a Publishable
>> Program is Exacting!.."
> Interesseting. But why not support Peters work?
>

I am absolute not working against Peters project!
I simply did it because:

- My C knowledge is _very_ poor.
- i thought the best way _for_me_ to understand the RISC machine and 
Peters program is to translate it. First i thought to translate it to 
Oberon itself (https://github.com/norayr/voc) but even my actual Oberon 
knowledge is too poor, and i saw no SDL2 bindings for this (i think very 
nice) compiler.
- i asked Peter if i may publish it, and he agreed.
- and finally Pascal was invented by NW....

Regards
Markus




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