A Few Things (Debian, Sharism)

nebajoth nebajoth at gmail.com
Mon Apr 19 09:30:42 EDT 2010


This is mostly a thank you email for Xiangfu Liu and Wolfgang Spraul.  I
love the BNN.  I love it in an unbridled way that only open things can
be loved.  I know that this venture is a huge risk for you guys and your
upstream partner -- an untried business model, for sure.  I appreciate
your risk, and your whole-hearted embrace of it.

Both of you, Xiangfu and Wolfgang, in my opinion know what really
matters when it comes to building a community around your hardware.  You
are responsive, neutral about implementations, focused on your own
development paths, and friendly.  I am being drawn into the community
slowly and surely by the choices and communications you two send every
day.  I have never seen better in my 10+ years of swimming in the open
source ecosystem.  Thank you both.

I'm just at the beginning of my exploration of the hardware's potential.
 I have been participating in the effort to port Debian to the Ben, and
the biggest lesson I've taken from it so far is that OpenWRT is indeed a
very compelling choice for the hardware.  I had had experience with it
before, via routers (as most have), and even prefer it for my own
household routers.  But I had decided early on that it wouldn't do as a
prototyping platform... there are too many required changes to the UI of
too many applications -- to fit them better to the tiny BNN screen --
for it to constantly require the complexity of a cross-compile
environment.  In my opinion.

What we need -- and by "we", I mean early adopters of the BNN -- is a
bigger (and admittedly more bloated) and more familiar environment with
twenty thousand packages to test new ways of interacting with the
hardware.  Lessons (and packages) from that should then be integrated
into the OpenWRT main project for the hardware.  That is why I'm
pursuing the Debian option: I expect to continue to use OpenWRT in the
future, once the UI has gained some stability.

In order to figure out how to get Debian onto the machine, I went
through the cross-compile process with OpenWRT, and it confirmed for me
that the developers (Xiangfu & Wolfgang) are eminently sane, eminently
clever, and smart as all get out.

Thank you both.  Your friendliness and your excellence is bound to make
this project succeed.

For my part, I shall hunt like an eagle for opportunities to put money
in your pockets.  In my opinion, your openness and excellence MUST be
encouraged.


-- nebajoth (Dylan Herbert)




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