Hello all, in the last weeks we could watch some drama here on the mailing list, related to the expiry and takeover of the Cinelerra.org domain, the announcements of Michael Collins and the move to a new domain Cinelerra-cv.org.
Several participants referred to a "Controversy" -- talking here as a long standing member of this community, I can't see any such kind of controversy, and I'd like to elaborate why. It might well be that what we witnessed could be understood as a clash of cultures -- and thus it's good advice to step down the emotional part and stick to what we know. Without any doubt, there is a Cinelerra community. This community wasn't founded, but it grew, around a source code repository (initially CVS), a bug tracker, a collaboratively edited online manual, and a loosely associated flock of developers keeping all these things together. And there is Adam Williams, from what is known, the original author of the Cinelerra code base. In all the years since 2005, he never showed any interest in the concerns of the community and was rarely, if ever seen on the mailing list. From the internet archives it can be concluded that Adam previously was rather difficult to work with, at least in the typical situations regarding community contact, i.e. when there are bug reports, people need help or new people show up with new (or always the same old) ideas and proposals. >From time to time, Adam threw a new tarball "over the wall" (i.e. published a new release on the Heroine Virtual website) -- and that pretty much was it. In fact, the community grew from some people (Herman Robak amongst others) building a source code repository from these tarballs, and other developers started to fix the top crasher bugs, collected error reports and did all the tedious and sometimes unrewarding work to get Cinellera running more smoothly on a wide scale of distributions. The community developers also started to add some improvements and features on their own, while always trying to stick close to upstream Cinelerra, since in this situation without a working feedback loop, any addition means merge conflicts and additional work and liabilities when the next official release arrives. Around 2007, the old community developer group largely ceased to exist (people simply got occupied with with other things, real life stuff and such). Anyway, no one was able or willing to put in the several weeks of full-time work required to merge a new upstream release, and so matters mostly just stayed as they where. Yet this wasn't the end of Cinelerra-CV. For what it's worth, Cinelerra was roughly finished by then, very much usable for serious work, if you know how to get along with "her". There was always enough competence left to address the serious problems. The packaging and build infrastructure was basically in place, and Cinelerra-CV had been included in the official repos of several major distros by then. At that time, a group of people, including the Lumiera devs, agreed to do what's necessary to maintain the status quo and keep the critical infrastructure running. Our consensus is that people must be able to code and share code. And people must be able to exchange ideas and help each other. A lot of further people contributed in the same spirit, most notably by maintaining the packages for the various distros, fixing bugs, improving the engine and library integration. So to summarise, this community wasn't in the shape to get anywhere, but it was alive and able to go on. There is no way the activities of Michael Collins collide with that situation, or endanger the Cinelerra Community directly. But I can't see a clear alternative stance in any of his announcements and thus there is no base for a controversy either. I already mentioned that there might be a clash of cultures involved. Michael seems to think that big events need to happen, that we need announcements and be in the press, that the goal is to get the interest of investors and hit the market, otherwise you would be a "failure". Sure, you can move things this way with money, but this is not the only possible way -- and some stuff you can't buy with money. Moreover, in the world of OpenSource and voluntary collaboration, there is likewise a clear Code of Conduct, and Michael did not act in accordance to these rules. * you need to approach the community where it is, explain your ideas and deal with the responses, especially of those actually involved. Michael never showed up here at this mailing list prior to his actions. * you need to earn your respect, be helpful and show you can make things work -- before you announce great undisclosed things to happen. Michael didn't offer to help with server administration, nor did he show any significant coding contributions lately. * and most importantly, you're dealing with people, not resources. It's a good idea to be modest and approachable. At the point we're now, the best thing *we* can do is to wait and see. And continue with our actual concern. We should really reconsider what goals we want to approach next, and how. But anyway, our new domain name "cinelerra-cv.org" is an improvement and might clarify what we do was never meant to be "the only true Cinelerra", but a community effort. The server and infrastructure remains in place and personally I will contribute what's necessary to keep it this way, unless something happens to convince me another solution would be a real improvement for the community's situation. -- Ichthyo _______________________________________________ Cinelerra mailing list Cinelerra@skolelinux.no https://lists.skolelinux.org/listinfo/cinelerra
