4 ms·

User facing open source software projects do take a lot of time to make new progress or even just refine what's there. When the primary audience is non-technica

User facing open source software projects do take a lot of time to make new progress or even just refine what's there. When the primary audience is non-technical users, that provides a lot of surface area for people to complain without a comparatively large set of users who would likely transition from using to contributing. From watching things over the years in the open source audio domain I agree that donations/other-funding-mechanisms are really hard to get right in this space.

sneakernets 8y ago
You also have to account for the amount of work it once took, and the mindset that creates. It's another domain entirely as a result. The fact that Audacity or GIMP exists at all and was free was shocking to a lot of us. Programming audiovisual stuff competently took knowing the CPU on a machine-code level if you wanted to get a usable program (and wanted clients to be able to get something done in weeks, not months) and the idea of doing all that work for free would just get belly laughs from most folks. There's a reason the highly optimized stuff still costs hard money, and it's not due to hubris.
- slondr 8y ago
  Yep. There's a reason that the GIMP project also spawned one of the most widely-used graphical abstraction layers in desktop computing history.
  - blattimwind 8y ago
    Unless you count all Windows frameworks as just Windows that seems like a stretch. Also the reason is "A small company misjudged how to-the-letter-of-the-law GPL developers were", perhaps with a sprinkle of "some people rather maim C than using anything else".
    - pantalaimon 8y ago
      I think what GP referes to is that Gimp started the GimpToolKit, otherwise known as GTK which is the foundation of Gnome.
      - blattimwind 8y ago
        Yes and I'm referring to Win32, WinForms, WPF, UWP/WinUI, Cocoa and Qt are very likely more widely deployed. Though even the last place of the commonly used frameworks is still relatively widely used.

sneakernets 8y ago

You also have to account for the amount of work it once took, and the mindset that creates. It's another domain entirely as a result. The fact that Audacity or GIMP exists at all and was free was shocking to a lot of us. Programming audiovisual stuff competently took knowing the CPU on a machine-code level if you wanted to get a usable program (and wanted clients to be able to get something done in weeks, not months) and the idea of doing all that work for free would just get belly laughs from most folks. There's a reason the highly optimized stuff still costs hard money, and it's not due to hubris.

slondr 8y ago
Yep. There's a reason that the GIMP project also spawned one of the most widely-used graphical abstraction layers in desktop computing history.
- blattimwind 8y ago
  Unless you count all Windows frameworks as just Windows that seems like a stretch. Also the reason is "A small company misjudged how to-the-letter-of-the-law GPL developers were", perhaps with a sprinkle of "some people rather maim C than using anything else".
  - pantalaimon 8y ago
    I think what GP referes to is that Gimp started the GimpToolKit, otherwise known as GTK which is the foundation of Gnome.
    - blattimwind 8y ago
      Yes and I'm referring to Win32, WinForms, WPF, UWP/WinUI, Cocoa and Qt are very likely more widely deployed. Though even the last place of the commonly used frameworks is still relatively widely used.