John Layt posted on Thu, 14 Apr 2011 17:17:12 +0100 as excerpted: > On Thursday 14 Apr 2011 15:29:17 Billie Walsh wrote: >> On 04/14/2011 08:59 AM, Anne Wilson wrote: >> > On Thursday 14 April 2011 13:23:33 Billie Walsh wrote: >> >> I suppose we all have our favorite parts of KDE. For me it's Quanta. >> >> For whatever reason the devs at wherever have pretty much decided it >> >> was not worth the effort to bring it along with KDE 4.x. There is >> >> one person trying to bring it along and I hope someday he manages to >> >> do it. >> >> >> >> Why they decided to kill off Quanta is beyond me, well maybe "kill >> >> off" is a bit of an over statement, but it is crippled very badly. "They"... Why THEY decided to kill... >> > This thread is a perfect example of how basic facts about KDE are >> > misunderstood. It sounds, for instance, as though KDE consists of a >> > body of people who sit in a room and make decisions about what will >> > or won't be developed. That couldn't be further from the truth. >> > >> > There are thousands of developers, most of which code for fun after >> > doing a day-job. Once you understand this, it makes a lot more >> > sense. KDE, like free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) in general, is pretty much all volunteer, either of the individual devs doing the work, or as John Layt mentions below, corporations volunteering to sponsor individual devs to do that work. >> > I would like Quanta to be ported to KDE4, too, but the truth >> > is that it's a job that doesn't appeal to anyone capable of doing it. >> > enough to spend their evenings on it. Volunteers volunteer on what they're interested in. Just because something needs doing to fill a hole in the system as it is, doesn't mean there's going to be someone that cares _enough_ about it to volunteer either their scarce time that could be spent elsewhere, or their hard earned money that could be spent elsewhere, to fill that hole. This BTW is one of the big reasons documentation tends to be such a problem in FLOSS. The devs doing the actual coding don't find it particularly interesting, and the users either don't understand it well enough to document, or once they do, their need is filled, so they're no longer particularly interested. This is a problem the community has been aware of for awhile, filled in part by all the mainly user-peer lists and groups (such as this one) around, and more recently, by various wiki efforts. But it remains a problem, never-the-less. >> > Then you have things like Telepathy, that are ambitious, and will >> > eventually be very useful, but again, the developers are going as >> > fast as their time will allow. The developers of Kopete lost >> > interest in taking it further, What did they do? They lost interest. They're volunteers, and when the interest level no longer caused them to prioritized development of the specific project in question above all the other things they could be doing with their time instead... >> > and the new team wanted to do more, so >> > a new project was born. That's how it goes. Developers come and go. >> > Life happens to them. They leave college, get a job, get a >> > girlfriend, get married, have a family etc., etc., etc.. Their work >> > slows and sometimes has to stop altogether. They are simply human. Again, this is a challenge for FLOSS. Beyond a certain level, there's little appeal in the mundane task of supporting a reasonably mature project, continuing to keep it working with updated libraries, fixing bugs, etc. This is where the distributions step in, providing that service for a time, but after a period of years, their efforts fail to keep up with the increasing demands of supporting software that has become more and more stale as the rest of the system evolves around it, and eventually they drop support as well. (The enterprise level distributions tend to provide such support for longer, but at a cost of keeping up with current changes, and often at some monetary cost, as well, because paying someone to do it is the only way to sustain interest, at that point. Again, interest being the key.) Rather, all the interest is in the new super-features. Particularly since may of the volunteers are college students or the like. If a larger share were people actually using the software in their work, the focus of interest would likewise shift toward stability, etc, from features. But we deal with reality... Unfortunately, once people's focus turns to use and they're interested in stability over features, that's exactly what happens, they're now users, not so much developers. They have other commitments that take their time, a family, a day job, etc, and far less time and energy left to spend on what /would/ now interest them, if they had the time, actually focusing on stability and reliability. Of course, that's where corporate voluntarism in the form of sponsorship comes in, that being a major reason why the software stack we have today is as stable and functional as it is. But where businesses don't see it in their best interest to sponsor, and they can't see that if they're not aware of the situation, they won't do so. >> > And that's why in FOSS we will always have some beautiful fireworks >> > and at the same time some things that make us weep. >> > >> > Anne Thanks, Anne. As should be obvious from my inlining above, I fully agree, and was in fact ready to post a similar comment, had you not beat me to it! =:^) >> I realize how the "system" works. And I do applaud their efforts, they >> do a great job. And, Quanta probably fills a "niche market" so it's >> priority is low, except for those that "need" it. FWIW, one of the projects I contribute to (the gtk-based pan, an nntp-news client that more or less directly competes with knode, but at least back when I started with pan, there were features pan had that knode didn't, so pan remains one of the few gtk apps I use in preference to the parallel kde app) is similar niche market. I'm not a dev so can't help with that end, but am I believe the senior regular on the pan user and dev lists, helping other users where I can, answering questions and, I might even say even if I am crediting myself, helping to keep the community together and viable thru the loss of the primary developer to this same "lost interest" phenomenon. While web development is at least an ongoing concern, news clients are a definite niche now fading farther and farther from the general public awareness, so pan and knode both have a much worse situation to deal with in some ways than any web developer tool does. It's a tough situation to be in, and were it not for me and a few other stubborn die-hards, pan would be on its way toward being a small footnote in the history of net-news, itself on its way toward being a footnote in the history of the net, much as the gopher protocol, for example, already is. But recently, some light at the end of the tunnel appeared. Thru the cooperation of two (other) people, one a developer interested in pan but not in the politics involved with the gtk/gnome family to which it belongs, the other already a gnome translator with access to the gnome repository tho he's not a developer and thus couldn't by himself do much for pan besides provide translations for his particular languages, pan recently released the first real new version in years, where the last version released before that was only a minor bugfix release, to keep pan building on more modern systems and with an important security fix. As I said, while I didn't directly contribute to this, I do like to think I played a big part, as my efforts as the now-senior and most active member of the pan lists helped keep them together and active enough for these two people to discover pan and find each other on the list, in ordered to move pan forward! =:^) Without me, it's very possible those lists would have been abandoned by now, and this would have never happened. (Not that I want to break my arm patting myself on the back for it, but it really is scary, to one who uses pan for hours a day, to realize how close it came to disappearing, and it's really something to realize how major a part even a non-dev like myself very realistically played in keeping that from happening.) The future still remains a bit uncertain. I'm sure the two guys in question are still feeling out their new what-amounts-to co-dev relationship a bit. But for the first time in /years/ it's not as if the list is a death-watch any more. Along with the new release came the first update to the website (which the former lead was gracious enough to hand over to the control of the new guys), and we're actually talking about the possibility of new features once again! It looks like pan might be around for awhile, after all! =:^) Anyway, all that to basically say that there's hope, even for niche products, even after the original developer moved on, if there's enough of a community around the product to keep it going, and said community has at least one "anchor" who while he may not have the skills to develop the project itself, refuses to abandon the lists, etc, to death. As long as there's still someone actively responding to questions (and enough questions so there's evident activity), the lists survive, and as long as the lists survive, there's a fighting chance for the project itself. This I now know from personal experience! So you Quanta folks, if you really believe in the project as much as it appears you do from the comments here, don't give up yet! >> It's just a shame that such a great program is allowed to drift off >> into Never-Never Land. You can spend several hundred dollars and not >> find a better program. Witness the above personal experience with pan. Just because it's drifting doesn't mean it's yet dead and buried, especially with kde3 itself, in the form of trinity, now an ongoing project. As long as the old Quanta version can work on top of trinity (or be reasonably ported to do so), and as long as trinity remains viable, especially if it's base libraries gets included in distributions once again (I honestly don't know the status there), if the Quanta community itself remains viable, there's hope! The question is, are any of you here involved with that community, helping it remain viable? If not, why not? It could very well be you that makes the difference between quanta ultimately returning and its drifting into slow death, just as I myself very possibly did for pan. OTOH, again, it's all down to voluntarism. If you aren't interested enough to keep the community active, and everybody else finds other stuff higher priority than the quanta community as well, it will certainly die. There's no condemnation for all the people that /might/ have kept that interest alive. After all, they'd be volunteers doing so. And volunteers can and do often simply find other things more important to do with that time. There's nothing wrong with that. It just happens, much like the death of the project will just happen, if nobody finds it sufficiently interesting to spend their time on, any more. > We were lucky with Quanta for a long time that there was a commercial > sponsor of the work, an American small business owner who liked it so > much he sponsored an Eastern European developer to work on it. > Unfortunately that person can no longer afford to sponsor development, > the developer has moved on, and few people in KDE are interested in web > development work so no-one was available to port Quanta to KDE4. I > believe the future plans for Quanta is to use the KDevelop framework, > but it's still a lot of work. > > John. Thanks, John, as well. It's useful to know the story behind things. Of course in this case it does serve to reinforce the point I made above, too. Here it was a businessman volunteering his money, not a developer his time. But the effect of that volunteering and the loss of it remains the same. Hopefully, as with pan, something comes together for quanta. And hopefully both pan and quanta continue healthy into their own long and prosperous futures. But it's the volunteers that make it so. If they go, so, ultimately, does the project. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman ___________________________________________________ This message is from the kde mailing list. Account management: https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde. Archives: http://lists.kde.org/. More info: http://www.kde.org/faq.html.