I expected (and wanted) yesterday post to be half April Fools.
Then verified from a couple of sources that it wasn't.
I never expected TOSEC to stop as a project, irrelevant of central maintainer.
I understand that the original project people are tired (?) with this, yet I don't understand why this couldn't get the shape of an open-source-like project (obviously loosely using the term) and have some new people in the team that can keep it going.
After all, I am sure many system maintainers indeed have works in progress not yet published - like Helga still doing Spectrum cleanup, newly discovered Amiga collections (BS1 etc.) and so on.
I always considered TOSEC the mother preservation project (with MAME being the machine "father" preservation project) and always found stupid other conflicting attempts of others to do the same (except when there was a clean different mission statement, like no-intro, except that again TOSEC could be the super-set OVER that). I always believed in cooperating (but of course there was always conflict - people outside will never be sure who is to blame, usually both sides).
For ISO sub-project, it is true that TOSEC gave some "space" for others, as it didn't seem super active the last few years.
For PIX sub-project, also there are some very respectable alternatives (DMC?).
But I still believed TOSEC could be the one to (protectively) cover them all (and I was obviously wrong).
Anyway, I still believe this project HAS A REASON to exist, so I propose (and expect) the original team to not just kill something "bigger than themselves" and instead provide a smooth path for the project to evolve.
Hope for the best.
