Leonard Ritter wrote:
On Mon, 2007-02-26 at 11:59 -0500, Paul Davis wrote:
there isn't a single project that
couldn't use a at least a few more developers. every single project:
Rosegarden, MuSE, Lilypond, Aldrin,
now hold it there! i don't want any of your dirty fingers on my precious
code.
no, actually, i think we are doing fine. manpower doesn't necessarily
mean faster progress. if we just keep stealing from each others codebase
(that's what gpl is about, dammit), each one of our little projects will
turn out just fine.
In our attempt to help fulfilling 'the need for every single possible
hardware interface to work', we could use some helping hands. I'm pretty
confident that we're better off with a lot of (possibly dirty-handed)
coders + some good maintainers than with the current situation where 3
spare-time coders do it all. The current situation does help for
satisfying my personal need for eternal glory and unlimited kudos...
We should keep in mind that we're all doing it for fun (I hope) and that
most of us don't make a living out of this. Concentration of these
spare-time development efforts would be nice, but it doesn't seem to be
working that way.
My personal feeling is that the initial effort to learn somebody else's
code is the main bottleneck towards entering a project. Sometimes people
think they can do it better, or that it will be easier to do a complete
rewrite. And sometimes they are right (e.g. ZynAddSubFX).
To some extent, the developers are to blame too. How often does a
project lack (decent) source code documentation, while that is IMHO
necessary for cooperation?
From a global view, there is something to be said for the fact that
fragmentation is one of our strengths, but it might as well be one of
our biggest enemies.
a few cents of mine,
Pieter Palmers
FreeBoB - Firewire Audio for Linux
PS: tell me that these already exist, so that I don't have to start my
own private projects: 'AbletonLive4Linux', a decent arpeggiator (I can't
seem to grasp QMidiArp), 'lock-jack-transport-to-tha-captured-beat'.
