qt is the same - you wrong for qt2 way back. it broke by qt3, then again in qt4 and again in qt5.

motif is stable because it goes nowhere. it gains nothing new. nothing is improved. you could use gtk2 or gtk1 - if your app was written against it and do the same - install the older gtk and compile against it. presto. that's the same situation you have with motif. motif is just gtk1 and it never moved beyond that.

you really are not aware of gtk's history are you? your comment pretty much says it (fyi i don't develop on or for gtk - i have contributed long ago, so i'm neutral on it - but spreading the kind of comments as above is creating fiction likely from someone who never saw the motif version of gimp, and didn't know that it was motif, xt, or "diy" in those days. gimp had tried motif and that was pretty damned bad. xt was worse. qt was not an option as you needed to hunt down binaries of qt for your os as you got no source, and this was a real problem for people running it on solaris, sunos, ultrix, etc. etc. - you could talk openlook - but that was pretty much the same as motif/xt in terms of viability, so the only option left was "diy" and thats how gtk was born).

Actually there is an easy way to do this. an INDIVIDUAL from the project invoices. they act as an independent contractor. They invoice for "support". You don't need a COMPANY to send an invoice and bill someone. An individual can do it. (Companies exist to take advantages of tax and ownership as well as separation of obligations vs the individual). In this case there are no obligations (or shouldn't be).

So now the individual has gained $5000. sure - they must pay tax on it. let's assumed 30% that's $1500. Put the $1500 aside, then give the $3500 to the project - if it has an existing legal non-profit entity. There is no laundering here. You do it in the open. you use fully documented bank transfers. This wouldn't trigger any money-laundering laws I know of. At the end of the tax year, declare the $5000 as "extra income", pay your $1500 in taxes and the project has $3500 now to spend (on a new server, storage, equipment, bug-bounties etc.).

Even better if the project has members who are ex-pats. I know that where I live, only money earned IN the country I am in (Korea) is taxable by Korea, *OR* if i remit money I earn outside Korea back to Korea. If I earn money somewhere else, Korea LEGALLY makes no tax claim over it. As I am not a US citizen... I'm not beholden to the US govt for taxes, regardless of my location, So actually... I can legally earn that money tax-free, so long as it never comes into Korea... so I wouldn't have to put aside $1500 (actually in Korea the tax rate for me is more like 16% - complete flat tax, not 30%). So it's possible and easily done. An invoice is easy to do. I have templates for them...

I think the issue here is that the projects contacted don't have enterprising members who have done contracting/consulting before... etc. etc.

you can put imagery into your prompt indeed.. as long as the imagery is only of green phosphors! :)

people did think about it before, but it has pretty much become forgotten, and hasn't been slickened up and polished and shipped in a modern terminal. it hasn't been demoed or shoved in peoples faces to get them to think "wait a sec.. if THAT is possible... what could i DO with it?". this is not an end. it's a beginning. it's trying to say "hey people. you don't HAVE to JUST do text. what if you wrote your shell scripts or other cmd line tools to assume such capabilities... what would YOU do with it? would you make an mc that has thumbnails and inlined image display? would you create a smart find/locate that displays thumbnails? would you add thumbnails to grep -r? what about a text irc client that used this and when someone posted imgur links it translated them into thumbnails right inline - no need to click. just see (ok could be nsfw sometimes).

my point being.. it's a START to make ideas roll. without the FEATURE, the ideas don't start rolling. so make the feature. show it works, fill in the missing blanks/gaps as people start to explore and push it, then add more. run with it. why should my terminal be stuck in a text ONLY world? why shouldn't modern datatypes (media for example) be part of it too, if i so desire?

correct. what is the hostname that is visible FROM one system TO the other? who knows. you may ssh through several natted gateways into an internal network. i do this all the time actually. it simply wont work then (the sftp:// idea). i am not fond of the configuration idea. oh and it handles uri's but not sftp - http/https/ftp sure, but that doesn't solve the issue here. to work right it needs to transport via the terminal stream, and that's where i haven't decided on a sensible solution. i've given it some thought, but if i'm going to bother, i'm going to "make it right" so it works not just over ssh, but over telnet or anything else and goes through hops (ssh to a, then from a ssh to b, then ssh to c - and b and c are inside a nat behind a).

bingo. it's a terminal at its core and does all the things a regular terminal does. it ADDS things you CAN use. you CAN set a background to an image fine - most terms can since i added that to rxvt many years ago and started the trend (rxvt-xpm became eterm and then everyone copied). there is nothing wrong with ADDING some bonus features. the libraries already do all the work. the code and features are there. it's generic code. there is no good reason to specifically disallow such things just because it's a terminal. if its possible to add and you spend a little effort on it, then why not?

it's no more dangerous than a filemanager that automatically displays thumbnails too.

it's a demo for crying out loud. it's meant to show off as much as possible in a short space of time, NOT show you how you MUST use it every day. a looping video of a dark night sky with clouds drifting by etc. would be perfect. doesn't obscure your text BUT provides a nice "pattern". i don't happen to have such video content with me right now. imagine:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/christopics/118890688/

but without the people, (and the pool right at the bottom, not the middle), with the video edited to loop seamlessly.

the point of features is to make it POSSIBLE, with visual content. given the logic of "don't have features because gasp. someone may not provide perfect content" would imply we should not ever set wallpapers on our desktops because.. GASP.. it may clash with icons/text content there and may make it hard to read! just create/find appropriate content.

what you don't get is.. the pdf comes for free if you do images/svg's etc... that's the point of libraries. and there is a vast difference between writing a full pdf viewer and something that just happens to display them because its whole toolkit stack gives it that for free.

as for your quoting of unix philosophy... it's like the church saying the world is flat and people being too scared to get in a boat and sail west from europe lest they fall off the edge of the world! why does everything have to religiously obey some specific philosophy? why do we have to limit ourselves to a tiny little box when creating things because you wish to quote some philosophy? terminology already supports links. already supports xdg-open stuff (run a command on a click). it HAPPENS to sit on top of a toolkit bas that just to add a nice feature of "give me a background" HAPPENS to at the same time let you do pdf's in a bg or videos or pop them up for a tiny little bit of ui work (place object above text in a container). the library set is modular. the pdf and svg loading is in fact handled by external processes and piped through library layers to hand you an image object - and at that point you don't much care where it came from. the blind adherence to "unix philosophy" means you never INTEGRATE. you never get to this point of "wow... everything .. JUST WORKS", because you stop thinking out of the box.

it's modular. just at the library level which does make for a lot more efficiency. :) and what is new here - bringing the usability to your regular cmdline terminal without the need for launching other apps in windows... oh and did you read? it can render with opengl.. THAT is not exactly old hat.. AND it works in the framebuffer without x... and gives u moue control and copy and paste... IN the framebuffer... AND.. its like 20 TIMES faster than the kernel text console (try see how long u ait for a file to cat in the console vt)... and then in your console u can view pdf's, images and videos... the SAME as you do in x... oh and tabs and splits will work in the fb too... oh and it works in wayland too... not like there are a lot of terminals for wayland atm.

it already does uri's... just provide http://blahlahblah.com/blah instead of /path/to/file and it'll fetch it. here's the catch - that;s not useful as WHO will serve it? what URL? what webserver? won't work over ssh. wont work OVER your connection. it has to work VIA it to be feasible.

now to display a thumbnail i could have tyls generate small low res thumbs itself and embed the thumbnail image inside escapes and send it down the terminal pipe, but this will only work for small thumbnails - what if i want to ... play video? then we have to stream the entire video via an escapecode... and that;s just awful! i am not ready for THAT level of evil.

btw. thanks so much for being an informed user who will bother to look at the code before rabbiting on about vague unfounded assumptions. :) i guess it's sad that i have to even say this. :) anyway - and tyls.c is ugly as. it was a quick test program i brewed to test the escapes it is not at a nice piece of code... :) it needs some love.

I say this as the guy who wrote it... came up with the escaping side Chanel data scheme and wrote most of the library code it depends on in efl. :)

Please become informed before claiming things you have no clue about. It does everything your current terminal does (more or less if we talk of vt100/200 and friends) the same way. It ALSO adds extended escapes and inside these all it sends is file paths or uri text. If you call a file path high bandwidth then ok, guilty. But I think you are simply living up to slashdots reputation in the users category of blowing hot air.

Terminology also does this if it doesn't know the media file type or it's a directory and it asks a generic open tool to deal with it. ( Configurable). Thus it opens with your favorite tool or even a file manager view.