6 Sep
2003
6 Sep
'03
10:46 a.m.
On Saturday 06 September 2003 12:58, Paul Davis wrote:
everyone wanting their own project, so you have
myself, werner (muse)
and richard brown (rosegarden)
Bown, not Brown.
all working on our own sequencer/daw
apps rather than together on a single program.
Mostly I think that's inevitable and not a bad thing. Richard isn't the
only core Rosegarden developer -- there are three of us -- and the
project has a quite different focus from Ardour. It's not at all clear
that any of us would be working on Ardour even if it were practical to
do so and we were not working on Rosegarden. I'm sure the reverse is
also true. And I would be surprised if these two projects really
compete with one another at all in practice.
Of course, the relationship is somewhat lopsided -- we get to use
technology you've developed (such as JACK) but Rosegarden has never
really contributed anything reusable back to the pool of common code.
That's not ideal, but again, it's not surprising -- Rosegarden is very
much about GUI, it has little in the nature of truly interesting core
technology.
The similarity between Rosegarden and MusE is another matter, but even
then they have quite different personalities. People tend to prefer
one or the other immediately, and not necessarily just on the basis of
features. So long as there is no more diversity than on other
platforms and so long as the projects are cooperative where necessary,
I think things should be fine.
So no, I don't think there's a problem now. But there probably will be
in the future, as projects continue to become more diverse. If the
fact that the code is available isn't enough to entice people to
contribute to existing projects, then sure, we will start to see
applications dying off as they reach 80-90% complete (the stage at
which the core developers are happy to use them but nobody else is),
and other new projects springing up, and nothing ever really being
usable. Several applications (Brahms, Jazz, Denemo, a handful of MIDI
sequencers) have already appeared to fade when at reasonably advanced
stages, and it's probably only because none of them had yet become
truly competitive with shrinkwrap programs on other platforms and
because other projects were already beginning to offer more that we've
been prepared to accept their disappearance as normal.
Chris