[Oberon] more attention and a larger community?

[greim]

Regarding Volkerts suggestions:

> Date: Sun, 04 May 2014 10:20:21 +0200
> From: "volkert at nivoba.de" <volkert at nivoba.de>
> Subject: Re: [Oberon] Project Oberon: What are nexts steps?
> To: ETH Oberon and related systems <oberon at lists.inf.ethz.ch>
> Message-ID: <5365F845.5060401 at nivoba.de>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252; format=flowed
>
> My addition: For me the top issue is how to get more attention and a larger community?
>
> Here are my ideas:
>
> - a ?Project Oberon Manifesto?: Goals, principles, values, ...
> - an easy to get and ready to use ?Oberon Starter Kit? (FPGA System and Emulation-System)
> - some essiantial howto's, beginner tutorials
> - an ?Oberon lesson plan? to help studing the ?System Oberon System?
> - some nice showcases (community projects, nice pictures, ...)
> - documentation (all the NW Books are perfect here)
> - some kind of ?Project Oberon Board? to create a vision, make decisions about future directions (f.e. move to a new fpga-board, target plattforms, usb-support, color support, ...)
> - a product backlog and roadmap for the next 3-5 years
> - a bounty scheme to sponsor fixes and future developments
> - open and transparent development
> - one stop shop for ?Project Oberon? (news, blogs, download, development, community, )
> - ?
>
> Stupid ideas?

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.

- 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+ )

- 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)

- 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.

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!.."

Markus Greim


>
> BW,
> Volkert
>