From Ultimate Commander
Note: In the followings when reference is made to the word free, it means Free Software, not free beer.
I think it is very important to emphasize the values of a project. Many projects born without clearly reasoning their purpose, their values, why they are unique and necessary and without these basic directions, they eventually fade away.
In the case of Ultimate Commander, I felt a burning need for a modern, very powerful file manager that works on Linux. I later decided that it should be ported to other free and non-free platforms as well, because that'd make the project more useful for more people and the technical reasons (Mono) are also compelling to this goal.
Without any further ado, let's see the values of the Ultimate Commander:
- The value of Freedom: Freedom is essential. Ultimate Commander is a Free Software, it runs on a free platform (Mono) and it's potentially able to run on a compeletly free software stack when used on a free operating system like Linux.
- The value of Usability: We should be very concerned about the quality of our work to create a tool that provides maximal productivity and a uniquely pleasant experience for our users. Because of that, a superior usability must be achieved. The usability of the project is currently governed by the Usability Guidelines.
- The value of Extensibility: We should design plugin interfaces, so that third parties could extend the core functionality this way, creating a much richer user experience and a much more versatile tool. Plugins would also provide a nice way to implement platform specific functionality in the form of platform specific plugins.
- The value of Portability: We should target as many platforms as we can, because it'd affect our user and developer base positively.
- The value of Developer Productivity: We use the highest-level, free rapid application development tools that are available to maximize our productivity.
