[Oberon] Future of Native Oberon and Bluebottle

[muller at inf.ethz.ch]

Stefan Salewski <Salewski at physnet.uni-hamburg.de> wrote:
> To gain new users (and developers) outside of ETH, the following may 
> be usefull:

Thanks for these suggestions.

> - A clear statement of ETH about the planned future of Native-Oberon  
>    and BlueBottle.

While I can obviously not speak for the ETH and Prof. Gutknecht, I 
can give you my opinion.

> I think that the Active-Oberon-Language with BlueBottle-OS is very 
> interesting. But at the same time I fear, that ETH-Oberon will die if 
> the big ETH people like Pieter Muller and Patrik Reali will leave ETH.

In a sense, both of us have "left" the ETH some time ago already :-)
E.g. I stopped working as research assistant in December 2001 
(as can be seen on my home page).  You'll find I am now listed 
as a "voluntary contributor" on Prof. Gutknecht's group page.
This is basically the same status that André Fischer, who is 
retired and works on Oberon documentation and user support as 
a "labour of love", has had since 1994.

If all us ETH Oberon oldtimers should stop working on Oberon, I 
think among the current users there are several programmers who 
could take over maintenance and development of the system.  I'm 
certain Prof. Gutknecht at the ETH would be happy to provide 
resources (e.g. web hosting) for the continued development of 
the Oberon system.  Even if that is not the case, since Oberon 
is freely released under a BSD-style license, anyone could 
"pick it up" and continue development.

Bluebottle is currently being developed actively at the ETH by 
two assistants (Thomas Frey and Bernhard Egger).  It still 
largely depends on Oberon for Aos as development environment.

-- Pieter

--
Pieter Muller, Computer Systems Institute, ETH Zurich / MCT Lab, Zurich
Native Oberon OS: http://www.oberon.ethz.ch/native/