[linux-audio-user] ANN: JOST, a simple host for native VST

Chris Cannam cannam at all-day-breakfast.com
Mon Feb 26 17:33:04 EST 2007


On Monday 26 Feb 2007 16:59, 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,
> Ardour, JACK, Seq24, Ingen, Hydrogen, even ALSA itself, plus many more
> fine efforts that i've failed to name.

While this is undoubtedly true (in the case of Rosegarden at least), I 
agree with Lars that it's not the whole story.

Rosegarden has suffered, as a project for actual users to use, from 
having too broad a scope.  That may be to ill-discipline on our part, 
but if there had been a lively and popular alternative for any one part 
of what Rosegarden does then we might not have been so tempted to keep 
broadening it, or we might have been more inclined to make it better 
specialised for users who we understood better.  As it is, we get a lot 
of users and prospective users who ought to be using some other program 
that does not seem to exist (though seq24 goes some of the way, and 
Dino and Qtractor are interesting).

From this perspective, competition looks good even from inside the 
project.  If MusE had been more widely used earlier, for example, that 
might have affected our goals, probably for the better.  If we had been 
more communicative with the MusE developers, in a particular way that 
probably neither project would have understood how to manage at the 
time, that might have had the same result.  We aren't, in fact, 
competing; the concept of competition may apply to the software, but it 
doesn't have to apply to the developers.

As it is, we have to work on what we have, and what we have now is 
something that does bits of everything.  That could be why we're so 
short of developers.

I do instantly take a dislike to projects that start up saying their 
ambition is to clone some commercial app directly for Linux.  But 
that's another argument (that I seem to remember having on LAD once 
before, and will have again in the pub with anyone, any day).


Chris



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