It appears that Thomas Okken has, after all, decided to also put Free42s under Git: (meanwhile removed).
needless dependency on SVN: for example, in the build scripts, SVN is invoked, while in fact this should be transparent to the build system.VERSION.rc is clearly NOT to be versioned, as this is redundant information that is already stored in the VCS (by using e.g.(the list is probably not finished) problems in this project (sourcecode of) the tools needed to run Free42S images on the forthcoming DM-42.
It is a pity that such sites have to be scooped up in some museum or internet archive site.
I can understand that a project that has been ongoing since 2004 is not likely to have caught up with recent evolutions (for example, it is still using Eclipse for the Android component), nor that there is a need to overhaul tools that work fine.īut the point is that I believe that such projects deserve to outlive their owners, but to guarantee that, a mechanism must be used that facilitates their survival: by replicating the entire project, and ensuring that it can easily be contributed to. Some of these projects also make it difficult to contribute, by insisting on archaic contribution mechanisms. A simple example of valuable information that should not live outside the Free42 project is this page - imagine the website is gone, how would one get that info without reverse-engineering Free42s? That website will disappear at some point in the future, leaving behind bare source code (which is more likely to survive because it will be collected by anyone understanding its primary value).
Tetra), SwissMicros devices and the public part of their software (eg the DM-1x Javascript decoding utility, the documentation, etc), JAERO, DGS and more. Example include synthesisers (more specifically those that can be updated via USB, think of e.g. Similarly, many hardware projects surface but will eventually die, leaving behind owners that have the hardware but not the software to keep that hardware running. The end result is often users that are left behind. But web sites also disappear for other - more mundane - reasons. Currently web technology (heck, here is the proof) allows to easily create websites without much effort - which means those sites often disappear as quickly as they came, because there is no deeper motivation to keep a site going. One recurring issue of many websites is that they come and go - there is no guarantee that a site will exist after X years. One might wonder what the relation is between those two projects: it's all about preservation. Recently I discovered that an HP42S clone might surface from SwissMicros, and I contacted the (currently deactivated) Free42S forum to see if there was any willingness to further open source this project. This is my own README for the Free42 project.