[Rule] What to do with RULE / Ubuntulite?

[C David Rigby]

Greetings All,

I have not posted for a while either, but I have kept an eye on the project.
I have read about the problem with the Ubuntulite name and logo on the site.
I suppose a name & logo change is inevtiable. Perhaps with continued
development, the project might be able to get back into Canonical's good
graces. I know the strategy of one of my current groups, Team Ubuntu
Singapore (http://ubuntu.sg) is to "prove our stuff" to Canonical so that we
can gain official recognition.

I have enjoyed my time working on the RULE project from many years ago, and
I learned quite a lot in the process. Yet a year ago, approximately, I
effectively stopped participating. Personal and professional reasons, sure,
but also I changed my valuation of one the core goals of RULE.

In my mind, I summarize that goal as follows: promote the reuse of older
hardware by end users that are not interested in compiling from source,
wrestling with the command line, and similar arcana of systems-level work.

I would be happy to delve into the details of my position, but I do not want
to clog the mailing list with a treatise like that at the moment. As well, I
am scrambling to get some work done on my latest project (
http://softwarefreedomday.sg) in the final days before the event (so many
vendors, so little time...).

Once the smoke clears on my personal horizon, I will return to the
Ubuntulite site to see how things are progressing. If there is a name change
in DNS, please post the update to this mailing list so that I see it!

Although I am going in a different direction myself lately, I would still
like to see RULE/Ubuntu succeed. That is also a philosophical and
professional position, as it turns out. I recently signed up for the
Moblin.org project. This is a typical industry-giant-led FOSS project (more
and more of these keep cropping up), and as such will inevitably cater to
OSVs and ISVs that are rallying around Intel's Atom-processor-based Mobile
Internet Device intiative. If for no other reason, we need grassroots
projects such as RULE/Ubuntulite to keep the big boys honest, and also to
provide an alternate software environment for projects that need it. For
example, Moblin is switching to RPM-based GNU/Linux in version 2.0, but I
prefer dpkg!

Anyway, keep up the good works, and I'll swing by for a visit every now and
then. Perhaps I'll even have time to contribute some small thought or
assitance at some point.

Marco, I'm glad to hear that things are interesting for you. I would hate
for you to be bored! I will be in Italy by the morning of Sunday 21 Sept.
There is a possibilty that I will be near Rome by the end of the month, but
that is uncertain. I will write to you directly as soon as I get a chance,
which will probably be after I reach Veneto next week.

Cheers
C David Rigby, way-too-early AM in Singapore


On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 4:48 AM, Shae Smittle <sds97b at mizzou.edu> wrote:

> I may be bias in this statement, but I believe there has been a good amount
> of development within the Ubuntulite project as of late.  We even have a
> Live CD RC which seems to work about as well as the normal Ubuntu Live CD.
> Right now thought there is a major crisis in UL.  Apparently the previous
> person in fact did not receive permission to use ubuntulite as a name and we
> are now under pressure to change the name.  At the moment we are weighing
> our options.  The full-fledge embrace of UL as RULE would possibly solve the
> problem to some extent, but some changes in philosophy might be warnted.
>
> On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 2:56 PM, M. Fioretti <mfioretti at nexaima.net>wrote:
>
>> Hello, everybody.
>>
>> I saw the messages on the list by Liam and others last july, but as
>> you can see had no possibility to answer earlier.
>>
>> That's because in that same month I have started a totally new job.
>> The corporation who employed me is closing the whole R&D facility
>> where I worked, without offering any alternative robust enough to last
>> more than ~2 years, in a moment when the Italian job market in that
>> field basically doesn't exist (not that in other countries it looks
>> much better if you ask me, at least in the medium/long term).
>>
>> This was good because, given the situation, I said thank you and left
>> as soon as I could to do something I like better. Now I'm officially a
>> full time freelance writer, instructor and activist in the Free SW <->
>> civic rights field. If you have a FOSS story which is worth an
>> article, tell me, any time.
>>
>> Back to RULE now. The point is that, personally, things look good for
>> me now, but I'm in an happy mess to reorganize my whole life around
>> the new job, and this isn't going to change soon. This wouldn't be a
>> problem if there were activity here. We left last spring with an
>> intent to merge RULE and Ubuntulite, but even that was left hanging in
>> the air. Two inactive projects one active project do not make?, Yoda
>> would say?
>>
>> In a nutshell: as much as I'd like to remain the coordinator, I have
>> no time to do it, it wouldn't be honest to say otherwise; but, and
>> here is the real issue, is there anything to coordinate anymore, even
>> merging with Ubuntulite?
>>
>> This is not a critic: I'll be happy if activity resumes, so if my
>> hypotheses above are wrong, all the better, really. Things like
>> mini-kde or similar others are still as valid as when we started: even
>> more now that netbooks are all the rage, and when an idea is good for
>> different reason than those for which was conceived it means it's
>> really good.
>>
>> So, if somebody can step in and make it happen it would be really
>> great, since again I don't know if and when I could do it myself.
>>
>> Ciao,
>>        Marco
>> --
>> Your own civil rights and the quality of your life heavily depend on how
>> software is used *around* you:            http://digifreedom.net/node/84
>>
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>
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