From: D. M. M. <ros...@gm...> - 2008-08-30 13:38:50
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On Friday 29 August 2008, David Tisdell wrote: > If I were a developer, I would jump on helping with the coding of the > project to give you another paddle. I get that a lot. Then the people who actually do have some skill at coding almost always come in with some agenda that has nothing to do with the main focus of the project at the time, so we just wind up getting sidetracked, and losing sight of the objective. We can't afford to be too negative about that kind of thing, because at least it's something, but it's another source of frustration. Like right now with the port looming, I'm dealing with some MIDI program change GUI nonsense that I'm sure means the world to Emanuel, and does seem worthwhile, but if we could afford to dictate and maintain this project in an orderly way, this patch would go in some kind of holding area to sit there for months until it was more appropriate to do something with it. That's what bigger projects do. Most of the patches I've submitted around have been ignored, such as the way I have the only ls with a handy -O option to display octal permissions: 640 -rw-r----- 1 me me 360470 Aug 30 08:17 es.po I appreciate any effort someone puts forth to implement his or her own desires, but we almost always have this sort of thing happen at a bad time, like just after a string freeze. If we announced that we had decided audio was a waste of time, and we're going to drop it, somebody would show up with large amount of audio-related work we would feel compelled to incorporate. Audio largely was a waste of time. It ate Chris's time for a couple of years to give us a capability nobody takes seriously. I got cussed out for suggesting Rosegarden as a good alternative for someone looking for more power than Audacity and less complexity than Ardour. All that effort just to have a feature that I get cussed out for promoting. What's the point? I should just use Ardour too. Everybody uses Ardour. If you don't use Ardour and use Rosegarden instead, then you're nothing short of an imbecile in the eyes of the almighty Linux Audio community. Yeah, you detect a strong aroma of bitterness there. Spit. That's why I ignore it whenever some new Skippy Gleejoy newbie user comes along and starts raving about how important it is for me to be on LAD and LAU. No. > As a public school music teacher, I have been evangelizing it at > conferences for the past year. I have been invited to speak at a > Northeastern US regional middle school conference on using opensource music > software in the classroom in January 2009. Evangelizing can't hurt unless you get stoned to death, which seems to be the norm. I've only met one person in real life who even knew what any of this stuff was about at all, and that guy was having a miserable experience. Most people just blow everything off the instant I say "Linux." They either have no idea what Linux is, or they think they know what Linux is, and are determined that it's useless. (I used to be like that myself, until Graham Percival mailed me those Mandrake 8.1 CDs and told me to try it, and after I tried it, I could go back to trash talking all I wanted. The rest is history.) Or they're hardcore gamers, and hardcore gamers are screwed on Linux. All the people I know who might remotely be interested in something like this are WoW addicts, and the tutorial explaining how to get WoW running on Linux is complicated enough that I'd be loathe to try it, given the likelihood of actually getting it to work acceptably. (Plus I'd have to spend money for software, and I haven't done that since 2001, and like it that way. Plus if I actually did get addicted to WoW, bye bye Rosegarden. I already have a big enough black hole for time in my life.) I'm even getting some black sheep complex at work over this, because I have no idea what any of them are talking about, and they have no idea what I do either. Part of why I took this job was because I felt I had been alone in a rolling metal box for far too long, and I needed to make some friends. I still haven't, and my big Friend-O-Meter is still stuck pointing smack at the 0. We Linux music dorks are scattered all over the planet, and I bet all of us have this problem to the extent we are individually the sort of people who let this kind of thing bother them. I am, unfortunately, highly sensitive to this kind of every day teasing and derision, and I'm close to going postal and getting fired for ripping someone a new one. Which, of course, I really can't afford to do, so I have to bite my tongue and agree that my life's work really is a useless pile of crap. Sorry I'm wasting the planet's oxygen with my garbage. My bad. > I feel like my understanding of Rosegarden has grown to a point where I can > try and help with some of the questions that pop up on the list (Some are > way beyond me too). Someone helping on the list would be useful. In practice, many others have announced their intent do to that, and it still usually falls on my shoulders to see that a post doesn't go ignored. I try to make sure nothing falls through the cracks, and if I weren't here, a lot of things would be ignored forever. > I donated a few dollars (unfortunately only enough to buy a couple of cups > of coffee but that was what I could afford). If we all did that, we could > make the developers lives easier. I don't know how much it would take to make a real difference, but we haven't figured out anything to do with our donations yet, other than pay Chris's web hosting fees, and most of the money is sitting in an account somewhere. We have a couple hundred dollars or something, rather than $5,000, but I wonder what we'd do with $5,000. This blog post is very insightful: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001158.html "Open source projects run on time, not money." I don't want to be a beggar, and neither does Chris. I imagine he feels much the same as me that we should be able to say that a donation actually bought something that made a difference to the project. What the project needs is our time, and that is incredibly expensive to buy. You can't buy my time in hour increments, because I'm already giving you as much time as I can for free, and paying me doesn't increase my available time in any way. I can see a case that I "deserve" money for all my past work, but I still feel like if you give me $100 then I should give $100 worth of effort back in some quantifiable way, and that proves to be logistically impossible to do unless the money comes in amounts big enough to buy a block of time. Specifically, for my own part, I'd need enough money to make it worth the trouble to quit my job for that amount of time, and then deal with finding another one after it was over. I've decided my own price is $50,000 USD. Yeah, I know. But that's a realistic figure for how much it would cost to make a real difference to the project in exchange for money. That would buy me a year or two to work on this full-time, and who knows what I might be able to get done. But if I had a fat checkbook, and wanted to pay to get Rosegarden done, I'd pay Chris in a heartbeat, rather than me. I've just been having this conversation in a private thread. I'll repost part of it in public: No probably to it [that investing the money in Chris would be a lot more sensible than investing it in me.] It isn't that I couldn't learn it in time, but somebody like Chris is in a different league entirely. He's been programming professionally for something like 14 years. I'm an amateur. It's like trying to play a trumpet duet with Maurice André or something. Yeah, I play the trumpet, but not like Maurice André. If you assume talent has nothing to do with it, and everybody can get to the same place with the same amount of dedication and hard work, then I'm still out of luck, because I'd have to spend 14 years to catch up. I'm definitely not that dedicated either to programming or the trumpet. If I had this stipend to work with, I'd try, but I can't guarantee results. I'm sure I have the potential to become as great at programming as anyone, but I don't have the drive to work that hard at something that doesn't interest me terribly much. If I had a fat checkbook, I'd ask Chris's price, pay to get this thing done, and just kick back and play with the results. That's all I ever really wanted to do at all. When I started here, I had long since abandoned everything related to doing development, and I only blew the dust off my meager programming skills out of necessity. > I think we need to more aggressively seek donations the way the Ardour > people are doing. If there were more money available, the people coding > could devote more time to that. Yes, but only after a certain very large threshold. Paul Davis was working on Ardour full-time last time I paid any attention. I have the impression that he was starving to do it, but I imagine even sustaining someone at a starving level would be ridiculously expensive. Ardour has that kind of pull, but we don't. We also totally suck at fundraising too. We've tried ads, donation drives, etc., and have amassed too little for it to be worth the ugliness of sitting down to figure out how to divvy it up, and to whom. You must also consider that we have something like 15 members right now, but how many are "active?" What constitutes being "active?" Depending on where you draw that line, I might be the only one, or me and Chris, or me, Chris and Heikki, or me, Chris, Heikki and Pedro, or me, Chris, Heikki, Pedro, Guillaume, and Arnout, or.... You get the idea. It's a morass. Since money really isn't the answer unless we can multiply the amounts involved by at least 500, if not 1,000 or more, then the only meaningful way for anyone to help is to donate time, and jump in and help hands-on. Of course we happen to be an incredibly hard place to work, and over half of the eager beavers who announce that they're going to jump in and contribute never wind up producing anything, once they realize what a quagmire they've just jumped into. There are no easy answers. -- D. Michael McIntyre |