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Offline kolla

Re: "Hyperion and Cloanto allegedly close to finalizing settlement"
« Reply #29 on: February 15, 2020, 07:26:18 PM »
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If you believe that a closed model is "undemocratic", I disagree. This is not "dictatorship". Democraty does not mean "everybody does what (s)he likes", but "finding consensus" and "finding compromizes" between multiple interests.

Look at your own team then - it consists exactly of people who have been doing whatever they liked, even when it meant distributing AmigaOs components that are copyrighted and closed source. And I have been told by several people who are officially involved with OS development, that the software license is to be ignored. Well, duh. So clearly legality and morals means nothing for neither the OS team nor Hyperion, and we are back to everyone doing whatever the f they want, share and enjoy. As long as you’re one of cool guys. If not, expect all kinds of threats, from white knights and “officials”.

The consensus has been clear and obvious for years - Amiga OS should be made freely available for anyone to alter, hack, modify, compile, develop and distribute as she or he likes, without having to worry about legal nonsense.
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Offline Gulliver

Re: "Hyperion and Cloanto allegedly close to finalizing settlement"
« Reply #30 on: February 15, 2020, 09:07:27 PM »
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Who? The willing party, Cloanto. How? By research and contacting original owner/authors. As I am sure you are aware, most of the source files do have copyright and license information.
I'd be surprised if they haven't already done a lot of this.

No, they haven't.

I have attempted to reach some in the past, as an individual. And it is a legal mess: some people have passed away, and that makes things even harder.

The problem is that there is no consensus at all: everyone and their cat want a different thing. That is why we have companies fighting each other, users going different routes, and amigans trolling other amigans.
« Last Edit: February 15, 2020, 09:08:15 PM by Gulliver »
 

Offline kolla

Re: "Hyperion and Cloanto allegedly close to finalizing settlement"
« Reply #31 on: February 15, 2020, 09:29:59 PM »
I have attempted to reach some in the past, as an individual. And it is a legal mess: some people have passed away, and that makes things even harder.

So how do Hyperion get away with it? They have contacts to “the other side”?

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The problem is that there is no consensus at all: everyone and their cat want a different thing. That is why we have companies fighting each other, users going different routes, and amigans trolling other amigans.

Exactly, there is no consensus and never will be, so what is the point in pretending.
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Offline cgutjahr

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Re: "Hyperion and Cloanto allegedly close to finalizing settlement"
« Reply #32 on: February 15, 2020, 11:29:50 PM »
This is just Thomas voicing his dislike for open source again, and bringing up the same old FUD. No, open source does not mean "everybody does what he wants". It means Mr. Richter and his team  could work on an official AmigaOS branch - without having to team up with a company he himself accuses of pirating old versions of AmigaOS - while other people could work on CosmOS, or AROS, or MorphOS and would be largely ignored because they're not 'official'.

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A good model, if you ask me, would be to hand over control to a "board", with multiple interested parties on the board, then negotiating on such board what the direction should be, then drive the process from there
That would only be a good model if the members on that board would actually pay developers - which is not going to happen (aka the Hyperion approach) or it's going to result in astronomical pricing for the OS and micro-updates you have to pay for (aka the A-EONkit approach).

AmigaOS development needs to be developer driven, obviously. Whoever controls the trademark (in an open source model) or the IP rights (in a closed source model) should get some input  of course: release cycles, desired features etc. But the idea of unpaid developers taking orders from anybody sounds like a recipe for disaster.
 

Offline Gulliver

Re: "Hyperion and Cloanto allegedly close to finalizing settlement"
« Reply #33 on: February 16, 2020, 03:37:56 AM »
@cgutjahr

People use AmigaOS because it works better on their hardware, not because it is official or not. There have been numerous much better Operating Systems for the Amiga from a technical point of view (Linux and NetBSD), but they fail to deliver the perfomance users expect on anemic hardware. Add to that the nostalgia factor. So competing OSes on Amiga hardware are nothing new and the fault is not somewhere else but theirs to carry.

I could work for Atari, Apple or your grocery shop just around the corner, I don't care what company drives AmigaOS. What I do care is my hobby, and have someone that supports it.

Hyperion is absolutely flawed on many fronts, but they at least give us the freedom to decide the route the OS should take, and offer a basic support for that. Cloanto does not offer anything at all. They have never approached us with any sort of plan or proposal. But hey, if you are happy enough with Amiga Forever then be my guest. It is your hobby too.

It is simple, those two companies are expected to keep doing what they have been doing, everything else is mere fantasy right now:

Hyperion will continue selling AmigaOS
Cloanto will continue selling Amiga Forever

Then as a customer you can use your wallet to vote for your choice. That is the best you can do.

I do hope Open Source comes to AmigaOS, I even believe it will inevitably arrive, but it will not be in the timeframe nor shape people expect it to happen. And for certain, some entity formed by developers willing to work on the OS must take desitions on the roadmap, or otherwise it will be just another dead OS project in github/sourceforge.
 

guest11527

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Re: "Hyperion and Cloanto allegedly close to finalizing settlement"
« Reply #34 on: February 16, 2020, 07:01:57 AM »
And I have been told by several people who are officially involved with OS development, that the software license is to be ignored. Well, duh.
Discussion is one thing. Lying into the face of everyone by making such claims is another. Nobody told everyone to ignore licenses. Actually, if we had been told to ignore licenses, we would have delivered Reaction as part of 3.1.4 right away. Kolla, this is slander, and it has been reported to the moderators.
 

guest11527

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Re: "Hyperion and Cloanto allegedly close to finalizing settlement"
« Reply #35 on: February 16, 2020, 07:30:44 AM »
This is just Thomas voicing his dislike for open source again, and bringing up the same old FUD.
Go to my github page, see how much I dislike open source. Please do not bring up claims like that. There are places where Open Source works, and there are places where it does not. It depends on what you want.

Linux is a different market, and it works differently. Linux as operating system is doable because there it runs on off-the-shelve hardware, and it has a critical mass of hardware and software to pick from, and a sufficient number of professional players that are part of the game that drive it.

AmigaOs does not have anything like that. With Linux, you can get away with a gazillion of desktops to select from because its users do not care too much (all power users), consistent look-and-feel is irrelevant for the server market (where the professionals sell), and there are sufficient numbers of developers to drive the game into multiple directions.

None of that is true on the Amiga. If we go open source, we have soon a diverging operating system, an unstable platform and no solid software or hardware ground to work with. This destroys the platform. The average developer can no longer base his software on a stable ground (which flavour of AmigaOs do you use today?) and the average hardware guy neither (needs autoconf 2.1 or better). It is good that we have rules how the game works, and everybody can depend on the rules.

No, open source does not mean "everybody does what he wants". It means Mr. Richter and his team  could work on an official AmigaOS branch - without having to team up with a company he himself accuses of pirating old versions of AmigaOS - while other people could work on CosmOS, or AROS, or MorphOS and would be largely ignored because they're not 'official'.
I'm just sad about the naivity of some people that believe that the Linux model would simply carry over, without understanding that this is a different market - it is a too tiny a market to allow the kind of "a separate distribution and a separate GUI toolkit for anyone" and "you never know how the print command is called today" model.
 
Second, I do not mind to much who decices where the ride goes, as long as there is a direction of the ride. It does not have to be mine, I'll probably find my niche. But what I do mind is that we do not get incompatible branches of software because it completely destroys the user experience AmigaOs is designed around. Simplicity. If you ever tried to install a printer on Linux, you learn what's wrong with it. If you ever tried to install custom hardware on Linux, you learn what's wrong with it. Overboarding complexity beyond reasonable control of the user.

That's all fine for power users like you and me, but it is demanding too much for the average guy. Linux is an Os from freaks for freaks, from professionals for professionals, but AmigaOs is not. Linux will never be a successful desktop operating system, simply because it does not have to be, and its customers and players are elsewhere and do not need it to be.

Note well, these lines are written on a Linux laptop, with customized kernel, with customized keyboard, with customized systemd. I know how to run this beast, but I understand why many other people stay away from it and choose Windows. It is by construction how the Linux world works. It is not even a weakness in its "market", but it keeps "average guys" as users out - those users that exactly make up the Amiga users.

That would only be a good model if the members on that board would actually pay developers - which is not going to happen (aka the Hyperion approach) or it's going to result in astronomical pricing for the OS and micro-updates you have to pay for (aka the A-EONkit approach).

AmigaOS development needs to be developer driven, obviously. Whoever controls the trademark (in an open source model) or the IP rights (in a closed source model) should get some input  of course: release cycles, desired features etc. But the idea of unpaid developers taking orders from anybody sounds like a recipe for disaster.
For me its harder for getting paid than not to be paid, but that is another matter. There are probably other forms of payment that could be made. Other than that, you don't seem to offer any real argument to back up your claim, do you?

No, I do not believe that developer driven is the right way. If you do it "developer driven", you create monsters like "systemd", "pulseaudio" or "cups" nobody sane in his mind is able to use. That's all nice for professional server applications, but in the hand of users, these constructions are a disaster.

Then again, I do not see much of a problem with the way how it works today either: If you want to go open source on Amiga, do it. AROS exists, drive it, support it, let it grow, and we'll see how successful it becomes. If you ask me, I do not quite see the point to carry over the constructional weaknesses of AmigaOs into an open source Os instead of doing it right from the beginning, but well, I'm not one of their customers either. If they want to have fun, I believe AROS developers can have more fun without access to AmigaOs sources by avoiding some idiocracies of the original system. Don't do it the same way, do it right.

Thus, you are completely wrong if you state that "I hate open source", you simply don't read my message. The message is that it does not fit to the platform and its users, and it would destroy the very central point of the Amiga experience. Simplicity. That is the point.
 
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Offline kolla

Re: "Hyperion and Cloanto allegedly close to finalizing settlement"
« Reply #36 on: February 16, 2020, 08:26:48 AM »
And I have been told by several people who are officially involved with OS development, that the software license is to be ignored. Well, duh.
Discussion is one thing. Lying into the face of everyone by making such claims is another. Nobody told everyone to ignore licenses. Actually, if we had been told to ignore licenses, we would have delivered Reaction as part of 3.1.4 right away. Kolla, this is slander, and it has been reported to the moderators.

Excuse, but this is no lie - and you very well know it. The software licenses for OS 3.1.4 has quite a few unclear points and quite a few requirements and demands that I find unacceptable. Hence I refuse to buy more copies than the one I did buy (original 3.1.4 with shrink-wrap license not presented at PoS, but after PoS), and only have 3.1.4 installed on a Minimig (still no straight answer from any “official” whether installing and using 3.1.4 on Minimig is in accordance with the license) - yet you have been saying over and over that nothing stops me from buying more copies for my other systems. Also I have been told “who reads licenses anyways” and similar.

If anyone is doing slander here, it is you and not me.

It’s no secret that Gulliver and later Minuous were the ones behind BB3+4 - which also contain components from the leaked source archive - what is the legal status of BB3+4?
« Last Edit: February 16, 2020, 08:30:58 AM by kolla »
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guest11527

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Re: "Hyperion and Cloanto allegedly close to finalizing settlement"
« Reply #37 on: February 16, 2020, 08:32:45 AM »
Excuse, but this is no lie - and you very well know it. The software licenses for OS 3.1.4 has quite a few unclear points and quite a few requirements and demands that I find unacceptable.
Then either don't accept it and return your copy, or ask its vendor to clarify the license. It is not to be ignored. But that has been said multiple times by multiple people...
 

Offline kolla

Re: "Hyperion and Cloanto allegedly close to finalizing settlement"
« Reply #38 on: February 16, 2020, 08:37:33 AM »
I have repeatedly asked the vendor, Hyperion, for clarification on the official support forum, through mail and through the consumer rights channels. No answer. How do one “return” a copy that Hyperion keeps available for me to download? How do one reclaim the money from a seller that does not communicate?
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guest11527

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Re: "Hyperion and Cloanto allegedly close to finalizing settlement"
« Reply #39 on: February 16, 2020, 09:00:03 AM »
I have repeatedly asked the vendor, Hyperion, for clarification on the official support forum, through mail and through the consumer rights channels. No answer. How do one “return” a copy that Hyperion keeps available for me to download? How do one reclaim the money from a seller that does not communicate?
Paid by credit card? Check with your credit card issuer. Though it is too late for that by now. But face it: Nobody wants you as customer.
 

Offline kolla

Re: "Hyperion and Cloanto allegedly close to finalizing settlement"
« Reply #40 on: February 16, 2020, 12:27:46 PM »
Luckily, I am not your customer then. Gulliver wrote some days ago that “the writing is on the wall” and that open sourcing is unavoidable...  he is certainly giving the impression of being part “the team”, having access to code and whatnot. And as usual, Hyperion remains silent.
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Offline cgutjahr

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Re: "Hyperion and Cloanto allegedly close to finalizing settlement"
« Reply #41 on: February 16, 2020, 02:47:32 PM »
Go to my github page, see how much I dislike open source. Please do not bring up claims like that. There are places where Open Source works, and there are places where it does not. It depends on what you want.
Okay, let me clarify: You don't like having your little babies open sourced. You were against open sourcing P96 - which would have been a tremendously good thing for the Amiga - now you're maintaining it. You are against open sourcing AmigaOS - and you 're the one developing it. I can see a pattern here.

Quote
AmigaOs does not have anything like that.
What does any of this have to do with AmigaOS?

Current situation: Your team develops AmigaOS 3.2. Releases it. Doesn't get paid. Then works on 3.3.

Hypothetical open source scenario: Your team develops AmigaOS 3.2. Releases it, along with a source code archive. Doesn't get paid. Then works on 3.3.

Other than that, there will be only superficial differences between both scenarios, like Cosmos starting a flame war telling people how much your coding skills suck and releasing CosmOS 3.2, and everybody laughing about him.

You're just trying to distract from the simple truth that in reality, nothing much would change by open sourcing AmigaOS.

Are you seriously mentioning "many desktops would arise" and "we would loose consistent look and feel" to tell us how bad open sourcing AmigaOS would be? Have you actually ever used AmigaOS? Do I need to make a list of available desktops, docks and taskbars for you? Or GUI toolkits and Gadtools/ASL patches?

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If we go open source, we have soon a diverging operating system, an unstable platform and no solid software or hardware ground to work with.
You forgot to mention that open source AmigaOS  also abuses his wife and beats his children.

We've always had quasi branches of AmigaOS or parts of it ever since Commodore went down. People were patching their systems to death, installing (allegedly) faster serial drivers and Workbench replacements or replacing major parts of the system with backports from AROS. Guess what? We survived it. And so did AmigaOS.

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It is good that we have rules how the game works, and everybody can depend on the rules.
We would still have rules. You're the only one claiming otherwise.

And If I were a developer relying on "the rules" as defined by you, I'd have started to use Reaction as a GUI toolkit when 3.5/3.9 were released. Then I would have switched back to Gadtools (?) when 3.1.4 came out, now I'd have to rewrite my projects again to switch back to Reaction.

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No, I do not believe that developer driven is the right way.
So how are 3.1.4 and 3.2 developed? Who's making the decisions?

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If you do it "developer driven", you create monsters like "systemd", "pulseaudio" or "cups" nobody sane in his mind is able to use.
So you're saying it would be better for AmigaOS if Ben and Timothy would call the shots instead of you?
 

Offline First Ninja

Re: "Hyperion and Cloanto allegedly close to finalizing settlement"
« Reply #42 on: February 16, 2020, 04:33:18 PM »
@cgutjahr - please try to be civil about this. I understand you have a different opinion on how to run things, but that doesn't mean you can't be polite. I doubt that you talk to your family and friends the same way you talk to Thomas. Please treat others like you would be treated yourself.
Karate, Jerry. Karate. It's the lifetime pursuit of balance and harmony.
 

Offline kolla

Re: "Hyperion and Cloanto allegedly close to finalizing settlement"
« Reply #43 on: February 16, 2020, 05:10:34 PM »
Should Thomas be civil too, and abstain from personal attacks against people who don’t share his views, or does he have some sort of carte blanche because of his “position”?
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guest11527

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Re: "Hyperion and Cloanto allegedly close to finalizing settlement"
« Reply #44 from previous page: February 16, 2020, 05:28:46 PM »
Okay, let me clarify: You don't like having your little babies open sourced.
Did you look at my github page? There is open source there. If you look in Aminet (hey!), you'll find sources of MuFastRom, and some other of those tools. In source form. There is, erally, open source, though for a different, more disciplined community.

You were against open sourcing P96 - which would have been a tremendously good thing for the Amiga - now you're maintaining it. You are against open sourcing AmigaOS - and you 're the one developing it. I can see a pattern here.
Huh, what? I'm not developing it. I don't know who is, all I'm doing is that whenever I see a bug, I fix it, but that's hardly development. If you want to know who develops it, ask Jens. If you want to contribute, ask Jens. He's probably looking for someone to drive his product because I cannot.

What does any of this have to do with AmigaOS?
A *lot*, because that is exactly what makes the difference. We do not have a critical mass of developers, we do not have sufficient numbers of commercial players.

Current situation: Your team develops AmigaOS 3.2. Releases it. Doesn't get paid. Then works on 3.3.
Other than that, there will be only superficial differences between both scenarios, like Cosmos starting a flame war telling people how much your coding skills suck and releasing CosmOS 3.2, and everybody laughing about him.

You're just trying to distract from the simple truth that in reality, nothing much would change by open sourcing AmigaOS.
A lot would change, and I'm really stunned that you don't see that. We would not have one version of AmigaOs, but multiple. It would be hard to develop any software for anything beyond 3.1 because there wouldn't be a stable ground for it. "Works with library Y, but only from distribution A, not B". It would be hard to get hardware developped for it - "needs ROM from X, not from Y". I'm really stunned that you don't see the difference between "here is the documentation, here is how it works" and "oh well, here is a bunch of software, make your pick, and if it doesn't work, well, wrong combination, but not my problem".

We would have a "KollaOs - motto - I know it better anyhow", and "SpeedGeekOs - but my Os is 0.5% faster than yours", and whatever other stuff. Currently, already about 30-40% of development time is wasted in compatibility issues by products that are written in an inable way. We have a couple of workarounds even in 3.1.4 to keep DOpus happy, to keep Kingkong happy, and others. Now, multiply this by the number of distributions to expect, and we're in a situation where Os development becomes blocked by just hunting down such issues.

This kinna works in Linux because there is a sufficient critical mass to handle such problems, but we have a much smaller bunch of developers. To be able to keep development possible, we need to cut *down* the complexity, not increase it. This program was already started with 3.1.4 (only *one* utility.library, only *one* graphics.library). How would that work with "just another exec" from "we don't do autoconf because we know better" or "just another graphics because we know how to save two cycles from an inner loop". Thank you, there are lots of other more important things to do, and I don't want *my* time wasted with a lot of useless dicussions with people that do not know better, despite what they want to make you believe.

Are you seriously mentioning "many desktops would arise" and "we would loose consistent look and feel" to tell us how bad open sourcing AmigaOS would be? Have you actually ever used AmigaOS? Do I need to make a list of available desktops, docks and taskbars for you? Or GUI toolkits and Gadtools/ASL patches?
See above. Now tell me, how is this going to improve with this complexity even on the Os level? How can we handle this complexity? Who can? How to create software on unstable grounds, without development power available to handle the additional complexity?

You forgot to mention that open source AmigaOS  also abuses his wife and beats his children.
Say, do you want to be taken serious or make a fool of yourself?

We've always had quasi branches of AmigaOS or parts of it ever since Commodore went down. People were patching their systems to death, installing (allegedly) faster serial drivers and Workbench replacements or replacing major parts of the system with backports from AROS. Guess what? We survived it. And so did AmigaOS.
For which definition of "survive"? It made the whole game tremendously difficult, as a couple of these "creations" are road-blocks for particular developments. Are you seriously saying that the situation is going to improve by creating more roadblocks?

We would still have rules. You're the only one claiming otherwise.
Which rules? Once it is open source, the ghost is out of the bottle. "Fuck rules" is probably the only rule I would know from this community.

And If I were a developer relying on "the rules" as defined by you, I'd have started to use Reaction as a GUI toolkit when 3.5/3.9 were released. Then I would have switched back to Gadtools (?) when 3.1.4 came out, now I'd have to rewrite my projects again to switch back to Reaction.
Reaction on your system didn't went away, just we couldn't support it for reasons you know precisely. I'm all happy we can continue to support it now. Nobody was expecting you to rewrite a project - quite the opposite, the interfaces should remain as stated.

So how are 3.1.4 and 3.2 developed? Who's making the decisions?
The wrong people. Developers, like me. Surprised? That's exactly why we need a better process. I'm all for opening up the process, just we couldn't do. We do have RFCs, though not as consistent as I would like, though publishing those would be nice, and having a forum for collecting feed back would be helpful, just someone to filter them because it is just too much for us to handle, and to filter out all the trolling. A bug tracker would be helpful, for the public. Most importantly, end user support would be helpful, because we're definitely the wrong people for that. We would also need people with experience in human interface design, which is badly lacking.

But there is a difference between "open source" and "open processes", "developer driven" and "design driven". Prime example in Amiga land "how to get it wrong" is DefIcons (which caused a lot of trouble and discussion inside the development crew, and also because I'm pretty bad at this as well). It is a nice software architecture, a good data structure, a good abstraction of the search process as a tree, so software-wise, Stephan did a good job - and at the same time, the whole way how its preferences look like is over the head of its users, and the prefs are a binary blob that is impossible to handle without an editor, and hard to adapt and unflexible. A UI to handle its preferences is as charming as the Windows registry editor.

I'm not saying that Stephan back then did a bad job, really not, but he started from the wrong end. But it was, as far as the UI is concerned, not the right software. It was developer driven. I created a lot of internal struggle and fighting to get away with this model and get something simpler and easier to handle, where you just drag your default icons into a drawer, and create the rule files, encoded in ASCII, with a simple Wizard program. So it is scalable, and easy to handle. That caused a lot of trouble and misunderstanding, also due to my un-ability to communicate correctly, yet, I believe strongly that the result is much better and much simpler and much easier to handle and to adopt. The software architecture is probably less "nice", but the result is hopefully a lot more accessible.

I'm not so good at all this as I should, but if you look around, there is a reason why Apple became so successful: It is *exactly not* a developer-driven process, but a UI-driven, design-driven process. That is, in a sense, a good example why open source "is good for developers" is a bad way of designing a system that should be usable by the average guys.

So you're saying it would be better for AmigaOS if Ben and Timothy would call the shots instead of you?
I would say that AmigaOs would be better if we had a specialist in UI design (and not a lawer) who would be central in decision making, yes. What we would need is a management that believes in its product (and not its money it may or may not make). Hyperion is a "company" and not a company because of exactly that. A management with a clear vision is missing, and a mechanism to implement its vision and communicating this vision to the developers. That is missing. You do not get this in the open source world - and then you deliver things like "Gnome3" or "cups". Nice software, bad usability.

I would be hoping that by creating a board that makes decisions, with developers having voices, but also management defining a direction would be a good thing. I would be hoping that the board would be transparent in decision making and communication.

You know, there are good reasons why we have a representative democracy, where - ideally at least - elections allow people to chose between various visions, though representatives care about the details how to implement them. It does not mean "everybody has the freedom to do everything" but "make your choice, but trust the decision makers to do the right thing to respect your vote". Well, at least in theory.
 
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