26 Feb
2007
26 Feb
'07
6:30 p.m.
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