Hi, This indeed is a very long reply :) and if I were to reply to each part, it would just keep getting longer and longer and ultimately unreadable :)
This thread was started by Jorrit, and as I use CS for my project and feel it only fair to contribute something back to the community if I can... I presented a "point-of-view" and invited comments to find out if this could be a way that I could contribute.. In my opinion, you've tounched the "heart of the issue" though, which being: What exactly is the target/purpose of Crystal Space ? And more interestingly... Who can/should define that ? My personal opinion would be that the founder(s) and members of the core team behind CS can/should do that.. Now, they may choose to do it all by themselves or invlove the wider community to define it, it's their choice and their right. As this thread was started by Jorrit and he included comments which in some way compare CS with Ogre, I assumed he is looking at CS more as a "product" with a defined focus and defined target-segment of users. Therefore, going back to square one, I would invite the comments and opinion of everyone regarding the follwoing: What is the purpose/target of Crystal Space? Is it something you do as a good passtime so you can run it, look at it and enjoy it (which is perfectly ok) OR is it something you want to become a useful product for anyone else who wish to use it ? Regards, Tj. -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mårten Svanfeldt (dev) Sent: laupäev, 4. veebruar 2006 19:16 To: [email protected]; Tahir Javed Cc: [email protected] Subject: RE: [CsMain] Re: Making Crystal Space Easier: Tutorials, documents, wiki, demos Hi, Ok, your mail is rather lengthy and thus will i provide a lengthy answer. I might not comment on every aspect of it thoguh. Quoting Tahir Javed <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Ok, I'll take it up a bit in-depth now as I have a little free time: > > I fully understand what you're saying, however this is basically a product > development, marketing and support issue and there are existing best > practices in the world, so we can learn from them. As any area there are no "best" ways of doing things, or rather the best way of doing things depends on who you ask, so I think we should keep from saying "this is the 'best' way to do it and all other ways are bad". > Here at Softronic (my > workplace) we also have products developed and targeted to specific market > segments, and the processes to promote and support are very much standard > and same... Plus we produce thousands of pages of documentation for each > custom development we do. My purpose is not to gloat about it :) but to > bring to your attention the following: Just to establish who I am, I work for a company making a product very similar to CS in many senses, that is middleware for mainly the games industry. I have earlier worked for a smaller company in this segment and now work for a bit bigger one. I am also a "long-time" (hm.. ok four years) CS developer and supporter. However I do not agree with you that there is a "standard and same" way of doing things. My experience from just these two companies show me that for three people are five different ways of doing things, including marketing ;) > > 1. There is no distinction between open source and commercial product when > it comes to marketing and support model. Thus we only need to look at what > are the best practices for success. There is a big difference both for marketing and support. In a commercial product marketing is very important as it is sales of the product that is the main reason for the development of the product (sales and the needed marketing is the end-goal in itself). However within open source development such as CS "sales" (or usage if you so want) of the product might not be the goal. For some people (such as me) the product in itself is the goal. Compare to the difference between someone having a fast speed-boat (the goal is the imporant thing) and someone having a sail-boat (the trip is the goal in itself). Also important to remember when comparing a spare-time open source project such as CS to a commercial product developed by a company is that the company have a single united goal while for CS every developer have their personal goal and they usually does not all point in same direction. > > 2. We don't have a commercial product, so increasing sales is not our > target, so we need to define our target what we want? I suspect this would > be something like "Making Crystal Space platform of choice for everyone for > 3D application development". (and btw, we should stop saying > game-development or else we're limiting the scope of our own product) Thing is that there is no "we" here really. Closest to "we" there is, is the core group of developers who contribute biggest share of their time to code CS, however this group isn't a single entity either. Outside this you have a larger group of people of people who contribute occasionally and then the even larger group who use CS in some way. As for limiting scope, CS biggest problem (IMO) right now is not that it limits its scope too much, but that we don't limit it enough:P > > 3. This "target" would mean at least the following three things: Ok lets for sake of discussion assume that this is the target. I will below put forward another one (my personal one that is;) > 3.1 that the market is very broad and include pretty much everyone, thus we > need to support all major OS platforms etc. Which in fact is the case. CS already does.. > .... > 3.3 Any of these various people in a team may have decision-making powers > and may influence the decision of whether or not to use our product. Yes, but imo this does not automatically imply that we should try to target all of these people. > > 4. In light of above, we'd need to make following decisions: > 4.1 Regarding 3.1 above, our "product" must be usable by people using any of > the major platforms. What are those platforms exactly and do we currently > support them all? What is our definition of "supporting" a platform? Is it > sufficient to provide instructions in documentation on how to compile for a > particular platform? OR should we do more ? If yes, then what more? > Here we see one of the differences between commercial and open source development. If this was a commercial development effort and we decided to support platform X, lets say OSX, we would get a few OSX machines and a few OSX developers to maintain and support the OSX port. For CS on the other hand we rely on what people (including ourselves) want to contribute. So if there are OSX-users who wants to contribute we can have an OSX version with the level of support those people can give, or we can choose not to support that platform. All in all it is not only about "we want to support platforms X, Y and Z, and we will have this amount of support for all of them", rather that well-used platform (and platform-compiler combinations) will work better and there will be easier to get help when using them. > .. Here I don't have that much to argue about, given that you have the target you put forward above. I want to argue that this target is not "correct" or at least not the only/most important goal for all/some developers. Another possible target (which is closer to my personal target with being involved in CS) is "Make Crystal Space the technically most competent open source 3D SDK". This target is in many ways totally different from the one you put forward. If we do a bit similar analysis to what you did in your point 3 and 4 we instead get the following results (using same numbering): 3.1 The market is rather narrow and would be people who have an intrest in improving CS. This also means that the platforms we need to support is those that the people develop CS use, ie if someone wants to develop CS on platform Y they do so and thereby supports that platform. 3.2 The audience is the group of experienced developers who can bring CS forward in its "life-cycle", and in much it is an "internal" audience of people who develop CS itself not "users". In fact with this target most "users" are just a nuisance and cause extra-work. 3.3 The decision we need to convince some people of is that CS is an intresting project and worth investing time in, not some "PR-people" that their project should use CS. 4.1 N/A 4.2 In much the channels are those you put forward but with a few additions and changes of "order of importance" A) Source code B) IRC-channel C) Mailing-list D) Forum E) Documentation F) website As we here more or less have a single audience it is easier to tailor the information. In this "scenario" what we want to communicate is the technical information about the SDK, and how to change it. As can be seen you should not try to make a too fast statement about "this is how it must be as this is how it works for X and then it becomes better", as there are many different views of what we are doing and why :) Ok, there was a long answer to a long mail, but I also think it is imporant point to discuss, however I am rather convinced that having a too "business-like" approach to it is not good. Myself a spend the time I do on CS for the main reason that I enjoy it, and secondary that I like to share some of the things I do. Code for someone elses sake I do at work! -Marten Svanfeldt ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Do you grep through log files for problems? Stop! Download the new AJAX search engine that makes searching your log files as easy as surfing the web. 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