Hi Andreas, > We > have seen *lots* of specialised distribution (not only in Multimedia) > that tried to address specific user interests and finally most of these > are stalled / unmaintained now because they never gained enough critical > mass to keep on the initial momentum.
That's a reasonable assumption, but it wasn't really true in the case of the 64 Studio distro. We had plenty of mass (e.g. more than 10,000 direct iso downloads in the first week after the 2.1 release) but found it difficult to translate that momentum into a distributed development community which could sustain the project. I'd guess the main reasons for that were: 1. Developers starting very similar projects instead of contributing back, because they wanted control. (One distro developer then demanded that we merge with the new project under his command, so he could make the design decisions but we would do the work. His inability to collaborate on reasonable terms was a major stumbling block for us). 2. Lack of easy-to-use collaboration tools at the time (e.g. github). We used SVN, and it was not easy for new people to get into. 3. Low proportion of developers to end users in the community. (Many people wanted to help, but did not have the skills to fix their issues). 4. Large projects (distro sized) are harder to collaborate on than single applications. There is a *lot* for would-be distro contributors to learn. Cheers! Daniel -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
