elisa-developers team mailing list archive

[David Mcleod <daiode@xxxxxxx>]

Comments inline...

On 6 Jul 2010, at 16:41, Peter wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 6, 2010 at 4:17 PM, Olivier Tilloy <olivier@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> 
>> Hi Peter & all,
>> 
>> Here is a very late answer to your suggestion, I was away and I'm slowly
>> catching up...
>> 
>> Some patches have been committed to lp:elisa (the community branch)
>> since Moovida's last release. As Fluendo Embedded kind of officially
>> announced that they discontinue support for Moovida 1.0, there is no
>> hope that they will some day merge those patches and release them.
>> However, I see two sets of issues to taking over:

Fluendo (from my observations and some chatter) seem to be hoping that the community picks up Moovida 1.0 or Moovida Classic as they call it for the interim period until they can release the 2.0 version.
They wouldn't want an actual fork of the project as ideally they would want some semblance of control. 
It is still being used commercially to push the Fluendo codecs. 
Also factoring in, that at this time their current media center project has no media center aspect to it! 
They still need it around in some manner to show to potential clients/investors at this time I would imagine.

>> 
>>  1) Branding: we'd probably want to re-brand Moovida as Elisa, the code
>> is GPL but the name is a trademark. That implies additional work. Not
>> sure about the legal implications of not re-branding, if it's fine then
>> it would definitely save some work.

Having looked into some copyright areas concerning work done on Moovida (wont go into why I was doing that in this email), we also doubt whether we would be able to use the name Elisa either. The name is tied to Fluendo and as that name (Elisa) was used commercially for a variety of projects (HP and TouchDiva) it is going to be considered their IP and part of their portfolio. (yes I know it was never registered etc).

If we were to work on this project of ours alongside Fluendo and carry on their 'Moovida Classic' application then it should be fine if Fluendo agreed.

(I prefer forking or taking what we need, defining our own vision for the project under a totally new name and hosting. The use of Elisa and going back to that old name has proven confusing for both the public and some commercial entities I know dealing with media related software.).


>> 
>>  2) Technical: issuing a release requires some technical facilities that
>> we don't have access to any longer, like a windows build environment
>> (they could be re-created, but trust me, it's a royal pain to set up).
>> Additionally, we'd need to publish such a release, and I'm thinking
>> about the plugins repository which we don't have access to, which we
>> probably want to host somewhere else (its code is not free and not
>> published anywhere, so it would need to be re-written). A possible
>> solution is to focus on releasing only tarballs and Ubuntu packages in a
>> PPA, that would significantly reduce the amount of work needed. Of
>> course that excludes all the windows users...

I wouldn't mind knowing what is and isn't available to us. Grooveshark plugin? and other plugins etc.


>> 
>> Did I miss important considerations? Do you have comments or additional
>> thoughts on the process? I'm not against doing maintainance releases,
>> but we need to clearly define the objectives and scope (and take into
>> account that, as for myself, I now have less spare time, having started
>> a new job yesterday).

Congrats on the job!

>> 
>> Cheers,
>> 
>> Olivier
> 
> Hi Oliver,
> 
> Is there any chance of Fluendo/Moovida keeping Moovida 1.0 alive
> (at least until Moovida 2.0 is properly out on all platforms)? In particular,
> the plugins registry, auto update server, and a minimal effort for taking
> contributed bug fixes.

As mentioned earlier it is effectively dead for them. 
So, everything you list there, if it isn't working at the moment it wont get fixed. What is working may not work tomorrow etc.

> 
> Otherwise as Olivier has pointed out, any effort to continue Moovida 1.0
> more or less as is would need new hosting etc (but so would any new
> rewrite as Florian was outlining). Personally in the short term I'm happy
> running Moovida 1.0 from bzr on Linux.

I talked to Florian about what we are doing as "We should treat the fork in a similar way the Plex guys forked XBMC".
Meaning, they took what they needed from the XBMC project, applied their vision to it, new name (Plex), new hosting and ended up with a much more satisfying and successful end product. 

> 
> Peter