[Gambas-user] Gambas fundation ?

[Radoslav Dejanovic]

On Monday 04 August 2003 10:00 pm, Benoit Minisini wrote:

> One, a Croatian people, wants some functionnalities in Gambas, and want to
> give me money for that.
> A second, a Indian people, wants to sell Linux boxes with gambas, and
> wanted to give money to the people who develop Gambas.
> The two cases are different : the first is paying me for a (not really)
> specific functionnality, and the second is helping the community in
> general.

The first would be me, I presume. :) 

I'd just like to clarify some things, and since you seem to be ready to make a 
fundation, to put it open to public opinion.

What my company is doing, among other things (you can check english pages on 
the link below), is something called HRID.office. It is Mandrake based Linux 
distribution forged together with Croatian LUG, aimed at corporate desktop 
users. It is our attention to have something ready for a SOHO enviroment, but 
not limited to that, of course. :) It is important to office users to have 
something they can work on. They're not interested in playing games (yeah, 
sure!) or compiling software from the source, tweaking kernel parameters etc. 
They need working evnironment, and we're trying to give them just that. 
Therefore HRID.office lacks many aspects of "ordinary" Linux distributions, 
but it is very strong in office tools, including OpenOffice with Croatian 
spellcheck (a killer feature), and already set up connectivity to the 
PostgreSQL database with some addressbook table acting as an example of how 
easy is for OOo to talk to the database (once it is set up). 

With that and some other features (including nice wallpaper images, even if 
you laugh at me for thinking background images are one of important features 
for such a distribution) I belive we've made a complete SOHO alternative for 
Microsoft Windows+Office. We have strong office package, really strong 
database engine, and there's just that one piece of software to make it able 
to completely cover the needs. And that would be - VB replacement! :-)

There are numbers of people writing in VB, and hundreds of thousands of lines 
written in VB code. There's much knowledge put into that. But, if one has to 
switch to Linux, (s)he would have to learn some other languages. PHP is just 
fine for server scripting, Perl is an excellent langugage if you don't have 
to deal with GUI (and still has something to offer in that area), C is 
everywhere but you have to learn it... 
With Gambas, they can much more easily switch from Windows to Linux. 
Not all of VB coders are professionals, many of them use it to solve their 
daily tasks and do not plan to switch to professional coders. They have no 
time for learning new language, but should be ready to switch from VB to 
something VB-like and start producing for Linux platform. 

To do that, they need Gambas 1.0 with finished, accurate documentation. 
It is of extreme importance to give them stable, mature and bug free Gambas, 
or they just won't switch. :) It is important to have good documents on the 
language as well, for that will help them switch to something that isn't 100% 
compatible.

The other point, making Gambas executables working without the need for end 
user to install whole Gambas package, goes this line. It is important to make 
things as easy and trasparent as possible for the end-user. The ideal 
solution would be if the user shouldn't be aware of any dependencies, (s)he 
would just run the application. No mess with installing Gambas, no mess with 
libraries - download it, run it and enjoy it. There are three ways possible:

1. Gambas is mature and great language. Every distribution maker has it 
installed by default, so everyone has it on their machines, so noone is even 
aware that the application they downloaded use some programs they already 
have on their computers. Achievable, but full of potential issues (what if 
someone decides not to install Gambas?)

2. Like VB, there's just one component (aka VBRUN.DLL) user have to download 
and put to some special place in order to get applications running. That's 
quite ugly if you ask me, but years have proven that users are able to do 
such "compliated" routine. Ugly, but working. Issues are wheter the user 
wants to hassle with root password and navigate trough cryptic directories. 
Partial solution would be making the system that could automatically download 
and install required files from the Internet (that means lot of hard work for 
Benoit or someone else who would have to maintain that site).

3. Making standalone executables. The cleanest, and as it seems, the hardest 
to implement. But the advantages are enormous. Applications becomes 
self-supported, there's no need to compile and recompile things, there's no 
need to have whole Gambas installed in order to run the app, and penetration 
is much better - people just love the app they can download and run, not 
worrying about the dependencies and chances to break something on their 
systems. 

Conclusion: having VB-like killer application would make more attraction for 
existing Office/VB users. But it has to be as smooth transition as possible, 
or it just won't work out. 

Now, to clarify my position. It is certainly not my intention to take anything 
away from the community. It is just the fact that I'm ready to spend some 
money on specific issues, such as language maturity and stability, 
documentation and ability to produce standalone binaries. I find them useful, 
I think they're good for both me and you who read this, and everything will 
be given back to the community - I have no intention to lock or "embrace and 
extend" anything. The code will remain free, it is just that I'll get what 
I'd like to see in Gambas, developers will get some monetary revard for their 
efforts, and everyone else will be able to use these features for free, and 
as it pleases them, without any obligation. 
I belive it is a fair game. 
I would like to hear from you on these topics. Code maturity is in progress 
now, so no need to talk about that. Standalone executables, documentation?

-- 
Radoslav Dejanović, founder and director
Operacijski sustavi d.o.o.     http://www.opsus.hr