From: David Hall <dmhall_at_gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 07 Oct 2008 21:46:42 -0400

Purple Dynasty wrote:
> 1. A suggestion: the Rockbox website should only post themes that are
> "certified" to work on 3.0 or later builds.

I fully understand your frustration with broken themes, and will attempt
to explain why things are the way they are now.

1 - Rockbox has been soliciting user contributed themes for a long time.
   For much longer than your Sansa has been a port. It is only recently
that the issue of theme copyright restrictions has been debated, and
therefore many many of the themes in existence do not have a clear-cut
license.
        Without such an explicit license (by the original author) allowing
redistribution of modified content it is not legally possible for
Rockbox to host themes not modified by the original author, though it is
possible for Rockbox to host the theme as originally uploaded by the author.
        This lends itself to a quandary. We could either delete all themes
which no longer work, or we could leave them on the wiki.
        Deleting non-working themes is in many people's mind silly. Why ever
delete content? Perhaps the original author will repair the theme.
Perhaps someone interested enough in the theme will fix it for their own
personal use. (This frequently happens.)
2 - Rockbox is a loose confederacy of volunteers.
        Of the many themes which are "repairable" by the above standard many
still remain broken. Why is this? It is because repairing the themes
takes time, a little bit of knowledge, and effort. There apparently
aren't enough people with all three to have caught up yet. This is to
be expected of volunteer organizations.

--Soap

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Received on 2008-10-08