LWN: Comments on "The Foresight Linux Project shuts down"

rBuilder Open Source

michaelkjohnson — Tue, 14 Jul 2015 15:24:35 +0000

Some months ago, SAS started working on releasing rBuilder as Open Source. But the work wasn't done yet when Foresight shut down...

I'm delighted to say that the whole thing is now available, including introductory docs with a downloadable image (referenced from the docs), and a google group to discuss.

The Foresight Linux Project shuts down

michaelkjohnson — Thu, 28 May 2015 01:30:27 +0000

In this case the life was crushed out of it already, and SAS stepped in and kept the technology going.

The Foresight Linux Project shuts down

nix — Tue, 19 May 2015 19:08:56 +0000

Well it clearly hasn't eaten the *whole* thing alive, since you're still here :) I'm just being a lefty unhappy at the way that almost every neat idea out there gets eaten by megacorps and has all the life crushed out of it shortly afterwards.

The Foresight Linux Project shuts down

pboddie — Mon, 18 May 2015 10:49:10 +0000

Well, as I pointed out elsewhere, if there's any interest in maintaining the Confluence content outside Confluence, there's a converter for MoinMoin that I developed to migrate GNU Mailman's wiki. It isn't perfect, but then again, the conversion between markup formats that Atlassian did when they apparently decided to "upgrade" everyone (between versions 3 and 4, I think) didn't produce uniformly great results, either, and they obviously have a few advantages over outsiders reading the public Confluence documentation.

The thread on the referenced mailing list seemed to be rather sad - people saying their goodbyes, even - and so there might not be much interest at the moment, and as someone who never used this product, I'm not personally clamouring to work with this content in other forms, but there are reasonably palatable options for those who want to keep the content around even if it's just for historical reference.

The Foresight Linux Project shuts down

michaelkjohnson — Mon, 18 May 2015 02:05:50 +0000

The volunteer hosting the main page content stepped down, and no one replaced him. An example of the reality that the council saw.

It happens (not that it's important) that I'm currently hosting the Confluence and JIRA instances. It's not that they have to go away at a particular instant, but as the project shuts down, it's hard to think that it's worth the time to keep up with security updates and JIRA/Confluence changes indefinitely.

The Foresight Linux Project shuts down

Mark__T — Wed, 13 May 2015 09:50:21 +0000

SAS has nothing to do with it. It's only our lack of time we can dedicate to keep it going. We didn't do updates to our current version for quite some time.

The Foresight Linux Project shuts down

pboddie — Wed, 13 May 2015 09:01:09 +0000

The main site appears to give the hosting provider "missing site" page, even for entries on archive.org for this year, but wiki.foresightlinux.org does point to the Confluence site. Then again, the DNS entry for that could well be pointing to Atlassian or their appointed hosting company.

The Foresight Linux Project shuts down

ledow — Wed, 13 May 2015 07:08:51 +0000

Da-dum, tish.

According to my end, the foresightlinux.org site is already dead. Someone didn't pay the DreamHost bill.

But the only reason I was going there anyway was to find out what the hell the project was. I'd never heard of it and couldn't tell from all the above babble what it actually did (or did different to others).

No wonder they had problems getting people involved, they were pretty much under my radar for their entire existence.

The Foresight Linux Project shuts down

smoogen — Tue, 12 May 2015 22:03:38 +0000

I do not see where SAS has anything to do with this from this post or any other point. Do you have evidence about this that you can point to?

The Foresight Linux Project shuts down

branden — Tue, 12 May 2015 17:49:33 +0000

You'd think they would have seen this coming...

The Foresight Linux Project shuts down

pboddie — Tue, 12 May 2015 17:44:37 +0000

If anyone wants to host the wiki content but not bind themselves to Confluence, it should be possible to convert it to MoinMoin as was done for the Mailman project fairly recently.

The Foresight Linux Project shuts down

michaelkjohnson — Tue, 12 May 2015 17:35:50 +0000

SAS wasn't building Foresight, just hosting it. SAS has released as open source more of the rPath-sourced components than rPath did, and continues to push updates -- see https://github.com/stars/conarysync for the rPath-related repositories to which SAS continues to contribute.

I'll repeat what I said in the announcement: SAS was continuing this support for Foresight; it was the Foresight council who saw that the time had come to acknowledge the current state of volunteerism within the project.

Regarding "eaten the whole thing alive", that's a rather unfortunate characterization of continuing to invest in the technology and release it as open source, and purposely doing so under the terms of the liberal Apache 2 license so that there would be more possibility of the components being useful elsewhere as well as together. Not really sure what alternative you would be proposing.

The Foresight Linux Project shuts down

nix — Tue, 12 May 2015 14:48:28 +0000

Is that it for everything built using rPath and rBuilder? A shame, they were a very nice system, but it looks like SAS has eaten the whole thing alive and left nothing behind.