I have been following this discussion with great interest, to see what would happen with Pardus and TUBITAK. Unfortunately, as
richdb points out, the situation appears to have gone from bad to worse.
I have carefully read all the information and links which have been posted here in our English-language forum -- and tried to remain hopeful. IMHO, the most damaging / discouraging news is the lengthy message written by Bahadir Kandemir (
http://tinyurl.com/74hural ), a Pardus developer who resigned and actually provides firsthand evidence of the situation inside TUBITAK. Another "insider's" report, clearly written from the heart, was posted by Ozan Caglayan on his blog:
http://developer.pardus.org.tr/people/ozan/blog/?p=144. (It was translated into English by Yasin Aydin).
I have been using Pardus since 2009 and it is one of my two "go-to" distros. Solid, reliable, with many nice touches, for me it lived up to someone's claim that Pardus was one of the best (if not
the best) implementation of KDE 4 in the Linux ecosystem. So although it is difficult for me to admit it, it seems almost certain that Pardus is dying. :'(
It seems inevitable that Pardus will have to be forked if the community wishes for the developers' hard work to live on ... I, for one, am certainly willing to use a new fork (if it materializes) and I applaud the efforts of everyone who is volunteering to be a part of it:
atolboo, richdb, acjohnson, tribunal, sw (with apologies to others I may have forgotten to mention). I am a simple end-user without programming skills or any in-depth Linux knowledge, but I would certainly be willing to test a new version on a spare partition of my hard drive and report bugs, problems, etc.
From a logistics viewpoint, one big problem will be the language barrier (which we have experienced before). From the IRC session which
acjohnson provided, you can see that some participants were frustrated with being unable to communicate in a common language. I hope there is some way that the efforts of the Turkish-speaking community can be better coordinated with the English-speaking and German-speaking users. (I am not trying to be negative -- just realistic).
I have not completely abandoned ship yet (I am writing this from my Pardus 2011.2 installation). I will stick around and see what happens.
Thanks again to everyone who uses and supports Pardus --
or a new fork of it, despite TUBITAK's current organizational problems.
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