The Kitchen Sink Collection [discontinued]

[webfork]

Thanks guinness.

I was going to point to a similar forum where the plugin author appears to have responded:

http://www.ghisler.ch/board/viewtopic.php?t=23548

[toomuchjunk]

Hey Guys,

I personally would love to see the kitchen sink project return to life in an updated form. Whatever happened with the licensing etc? I am wondering if it had anything to do with servers and their attributes of high availability or if it was completely a licensing issue. Either way, this seems like a project that would not only be useful if reconsidered, but is possible to reconsider. Any time servers or licensing is an issue there is a way to move forward. Have you guys considered hitting up some kind of IT staffing agency to see if any young up and comers can take care of this?

[webfork]

I personally would love to see the kitchen sink project return to life in an updated form. Whatever happened with the licensing etc?

There were two goals of the project that seemed mutually exclusive.

1. In full compliance with all licenses
2. Able to open any file of any kind

Because its very difficult to be in full compliance with all licenses, some programs were going to get removed. Because programs were going to get taken out, I couldn't open files of any kind. Additionally, I couldn't figure out an effective way to get Firefox included, and that sort of let the air out of my tires, so to speak. As I use Firefox more than any other program, its lack of inclusion just seemed ridiculous.

Despite that, its mostly its just a time involvement thing; if I wasn't working all the time, I would probably have solved some of these problems months ago.

I have been thinking about getting back on this again recently a great deal and your post is a good reminder that there's some demand so thanks for that. Alternately, almost all the guts of the project are posted and under the creative commons so anyone else could take up the mantle.

[JohnTHaller]

@webfork - We're about to launch the PA.c Platform 2.0 with the ability to add apps using our updater that was in beta and one of the options we're going to add in shortly after launch is the ability to add all the apps. Now, that's a big download/install (3GB download / 6.5GB installed... and growing) and includes all sorts of games and other things that may not apply if the main goal is to be able to open as many types of files as possible.

There's no reason we couldn't also do a 'kitchen sink' or similar edition with the stated goal of opening nearly every file and selecting the appropriate apps and file types to achieve that. It'd work with our file associations feature we'll be releasing as well as the PA.c Updater integrated (so the apps would be up to date). And the licensing would work as the apps would be the open source and freeware apps we already have all the licensing for, plus additional ones we can get permission from publishers on as we popularize it. And it'll work on any PC from Windows 2000 to 7, no .NET/Java/local requirements, and even work under Wine on Linux (platform, all our stuff and a good chunk of apps).

If you're still interested, it's a thought, so I figured I'd throw it out there.

[guinness]

Nice suggestion John! Would you need any help?

[JohnTHaller]

@guinness - We will as our file associator would need a major update for a package like that. We have it setup so that it'll have defaults for the common apps (LibreOffice, Notepad++, 7-Zip, etc) and that users can add and remove them as they'd like. For something like a kitchen sink collection (with the above-stated goal), it would make sense to have a full set of associations for all the apps by default. We'll also need help figuring out which set of apps to include, which set of apps to pursue that we don't have yet for a given extension and which app among a couple is best for a given extension.

[zak_711]

Then, it's a vice!

[m^(2)]

I think that a file manager with portable associations would work much better than something that sets associations across the system.
At least for me it does.