On Mon, 2004-03-01 at 13:24, Tim Hockin wrote:
On Mon, Mar 01, 2004 at 12:55:14PM -0500, Dave
Robillard wrote:
On Mon, 2004-03-01 at 07:07, guenter geiger
wrote:
Lack of collaboration is one of the weaknesses of
the free software
development (peculiarly enough it is considered one of its strenghts),
especially with audio software.
A weakness compared to what? Proprietary software is /definitely/ not
immune to this problem (in fact, I'd say it's far worse - there's no
collaboration whatsoever). Is is really a weakness of free software if
non-free software has the same problem?
I don't hear people complaining about Steinberg and Emagic 'duplicating
effort'.
How many OSS projects are aiming at similar goals? Each one has one or two
people on them. If you put 5 or 6 people on one project, it would have a
much better chance at competing with the big boys*.
(*) Assuming smart people who could find a common vision. ;)
Sure, but there's always a motivation. Sometimes the projects out there
just don't fit your needs.
Myself, for example: to do synthesized sounds, I want to run my
keyboard controller into a virtual analog modular synth. SSM and AMS
are basically the only options for this.
SSM isn't polyphonic, so it's out. AMS is really awesome in a lot of
ways, but it's polyphony is all screwed up and fundamentally broken as
far as I can tell (kludge, it only works if you use the AMS builtin
envelope in a specific way).
Now AMS is going to go through a rewrite soon, and I plan on getting in
on those discussions to voice my concerns, but if the project takes a
direction different from what I need/feel is best, what am I supposed to
do?
Start my own modular, that's what. That's how things get forked or
similar projects get started.
I mean, when it comes down to it Linux Sampler, Fluidsynth/Qsynth,
Timidity, Specimen, Hydrogen, and Lindrum are all redundant projects.
After all they're all just samplers. Good luck making them work
together though. :)
-Dave
(PS, AMS developers: I'm looking into the above mentioned problems
further, I'll make some test cases one of these days and post to the
list)