OberonCore official position regarding the support of BlackBox Component Builder in view of the Oberon Microsystems AG statement
17.08.2013
According to the Oberon microsystems AG statement the official support and development of BlackBox Component Builder (BlackBox) has been stopped (Letter 1, Letter 2). The OberonCore team shares the opinion of BlackBox users that the self-dependent BlackBox is easy to support due to its simplicity and a great potential inherited by BlackBox from it's ancestor — the Oberon System — is not yet exhausted (in particular: Letter 3, 81253, 81256). For this reason, we consider necessary to clarify our position.
1. First of all, let us define some terns:
Oberon community (Community) brings together users and developers of the Oberon Systems & Languages. The BlackBox users are the part of the Community. They locate inconsistencies and bugs, provide bugfixes, develop components and so on. We consider all these results as common, the results of the whole Community and the common heritage and pride.
OberonCore is the laboratory and the internet project rendering fair technical and technological support to the Community. Each member of the OberonCore team and the project itself are members of the Community.
BlackBox assembly is the result of the work aimed at making up some configuration of the BlackBox. The development and maintenance of some assemblies is performed by specific Community members.
OberonCore assembly is the original BlackBox patched with a selected set of corrections available to the Community. Each correction is properly documented1).
2. OberonCore team continues to develop and maintain OberonCore assembly regardless of circumstances. Only verified and substantiated amendments are included. This Assembly was a result of internal developments by the OberonCore team and due to the fact that the BlackBox Support Oberon microsystems AG was slow to respond to presented amendments (for example, 13492, 13696, 11/4441). Since the official support is ceased completely, the OberonCore team publishes the private working forum for public discussion of the discovered bugs and suggested amendments.
The master branch of the OberonCore assembly is to be readonly placed in the open github repository.
3. The appearance of different branches (forks), created by Community members because of their ambitions, desires, and visions, is inevitable. In this regard, the OberonCore team suggests to consider:
- BlackBox from Oberon microsystems AG as standard. (Now the version 1.6rc6 is standard).
- any other forks as only derived from BlackBox, not replacing it and not the new version of it either.
- BlackBox 1.6 as a fixed interface (including binary) of the framework and any branch project will be either compatible with it or not.
OberonCore team will exercise the above approach and urges the Community to join it.
Discussion: http://forum.oberoncore.ru/viewtopic.php?t=4446