plympton;561705 Wrote: > So, say worst-case, the team is in life-support mode, or moving on to > something different. Just say, not saying. What could be done to keep > development going? > If you like to help there are a lot of things that can be done, for example: - Making sure the information on the wiki is updated so it can take some load of the Logitech support staff and help end users so they can solve their problems without calling Logitech support. - Help end users in the forum so Logitech developers can focus on fixing bugs instead of finding bugs and handling support. - Go through the unconfirmed bugs in bugzilla and confirm those that are real bugs and contains enough information. As mentioned earlier, if you don't have confirm permissions, just add a vote and add a comment in the bug that you have verified that the problem exists. Then the bug will either be confirmed by getting three votes or by someone with confirm permission seeing your comment about the bug being possible to reproduce. Confirming bugs will take some load of the Logitech test team so they can focus on doing structured testing the software instead of spending time trying to confirm bugs reported by community. - Go through bugzilla and find multiple bugs that refers to the same problem and add a comment about duplicates in these unless they are already marked as duplicates. - Register new bugs you find in bugzilla to help the Logitech test team. - If you want to help fixing a bug, find the problem and add more information about what the problem is as a comment in the bug report or even attach a patch that solves the problem. - Develop third party plugins/applets for requested functionality so Logitech don't need to do stuff that can be provided by third parties.
All these things will take some load of Logitech resources so they have some chance to focus on enhancing the software/products with new features instead of just fixing bugs. plympton;561705 Wrote: > > Is the SB3 variant's source is available? The firmware is small, and > well beaten, so I don't believe it would be necessary. > > Is the ENTIRE SqueezeCenter source available? I never set up a > toolchain to compile it, so I don't know. I assume that there's some > proprietary binaries in there, licensed works, etc. > > Is the Touch/Radio/Controller variant's firmware available? I haven't > seen any repository for it, so I assume it's not. It's not really > firmware, per-se, but a full Linux distro. Would be great if the source > was available for it to build if necessary. > Since you asked, I'll try to answer your questions, even though some of them are a bit off topic. First of all, Logitech is still developing the software and they are adding new features and are even doing some major restructuring, they aren't just correcting bugs. Most of the source code is available besides the IP3K(SB3/Transport/Boom) firmware which is closed source. The major problem is going to be that there are parts in both Squeezebox Server and SqueezePlay/SqueezeOS which can't be redistributed without permission from Logitech, for example all the artwork and some other stuff. So I think the problem isn't really going to be to get access to the source, it's going to be to get permission to use all parts. Latest SBS source code: http://svn.slimdevices.com/repos/slim/7.6/trunk/server Latest SBS source code (one browser branch, will probably be merged into above trunk if finished successfully) http://svn.slimdevices.com/repos/slim/7.6/brances/onebrowser/server Latest SqueezeOS (operating system for Touch/Radio/Controller) source code: http://svn.slimdevices.com/repos/jive/7.6/trunk/squeezeos/ Latest SqueezePlay (player software for Touch/Radio/Controller) source code: http://svn.slimdevices.com/repos/jive/7.6/trunk/squeezeplay/ Build instructions are available as text files in the root of the above directories or on the wiki. I think a complete SBS and SqueezeOS/SqueezePlay can be built using the above source code but I'm not completely sure. However, it's really not the time yet to start worrying about unavailable source code and possibility for third parties to redistribute it, if that's what you are thinking about. Personally, I think these products would die if Logitech decided to end their life. There isn't much we can do about that, third parties might be able to extend their life a little bit but without Logitech (or some other company) no one is going to keep maintaining the software and selling the hardware. If Logitech can't do it with the current amount of resources there is no way third parties would be able to do it any better. I don't think people are willing to pay enough for the software to make it affordable for a third party to maintain it and try to sell it or charge for supporting it, at least not on the consumer market. If someone still wants to try, I suspect they have a bigger success rewriting the code in some more modern language where it's easier to gather help from third party developers, perl and lua scares a lot of potential third party developers. Most third party developers (including myself) tends to be more interested in getting involved in something new than maintaining old code someone else have written. HOWEVER, PLEASE NOTE, TO MY KNOWLEDGE THERE ARE NO INDICATIONS THAT LOGITECH PLANS TO ABANDON THESE PRODUCTS BESIDES THE FACT THAT THEY AT LEAST TEMPORARY HAVE DECIDED TO DECREASE THE TEAM SIZE QUITE A BIT. Some people read a lot between the lines and post their analyzed personal guesses so it looks like the truth. As with all rumors, some are true, but as with everything else on Internet it's also important to analyze the facts and not just believe what someone says. The only facts available as far as I know is the decreased team size and the fact that the interaction with the community is a lot less today compared to one or two years ago. The decreased interaction with the community doesn't have to mean that the software isn't developed, it just means that our possibility to influence it is a bit less and some of us are eventually going to loose the interest to be active on these forums. I still believe that our best hope, if we want these products to survive in the future, is to try to focus on helping Logitech and giving them indications how the products and software can be improved. Trying to convince them that the Squeezebox products don't have a future or trying to convince the Squeezebox developers that the Squeezebox products will soon be abandoned, doesn't really improve the chance of survival it just makes people more frustrated and move their focus from improving the software. -- erland Erland Isaksson ('My homepage' (http://erland.isaksson.info)) (Developer of 'many plugins/applets' (http://wiki.slimdevices.com/index.php/User:Erland). If my answer helped you and you like to encourage future presence on this forum and/or third party plugin/applet development, 'donations are always appreciated' (http://erland.isaksson.info/donate)) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ erland's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3124 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=80421 _______________________________________________ beta mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/beta
