erland wrote: > Those of us that can do it has already thought about doing it several > times during the last years with decreased Logitech development > resources, but we have all realized that even if Logitech only puts one > or two full time developers into maintaining it, that's still better > than having 2-3 spare time developers which already is fully occupied > with supporting their third party plugins/applets/apps on their spare > time today. At least as long as Logitech doesn't spend their time to > intentionally making it harder to extend their platform or remove > features we want to remain. > > I'm not saying it won't happen, because I do believe something will > happen eventually, I'm just saying that it's not urgent as long as > Logitech still spends some resources to keep the system working. > > I'm not saying that this is the case for you, but sometimes it's kind of > funny that people who haven't showed that they are prepared to spend > their own spare time to make other people happy without any economical > compensation ask other people to do it for themselves. > > Generally I don't think you or anybody else should ask other people to > create an open source project and offer it for free to the world unless > you have tried to do it yourself, without the experience you really > don't know what you are asking people to do and what kind of effort it > requires. It's one thing to offer a new geeky/interesting feature/add-on > for free, it's a completely different thing to spend your spare time to > support/maintain basic features year after year which people just expect > to work. > > My personal feeling is that for long time survival, we really need > something with a business perspective to back up an effort as the one > you suggest, as a spare time open source project available for free with > no new non geek player hardware it's going to die over time. > > The future will tell who will fill the hole Logitech has left, might be > someone familiar or might be someone new, but based on what I've seen > during last 1-2 years I don't expect Logitech to do it themselves. > Independent who will do it, it wouldn't surprise me if the new journey > in some way starts here in this community, so sticking around in the > community and keep using Squeezeboxes might be a good idea even if you > don't believe Logitech is focusing on the right things at the moment. > > To anyone that really want to fork LMS today and have the development > skills to do it, first make an interesting third party plugin and try to > maintain/support it for at least 3-6 months, so you at least know what > your are doing before starting to fork LMS (which is a lot bigger > effort).
Hi Erland Thanks for your considered post - your points are very well grounded, and well made. I fully take the point about the level of commitment required to sustain any development project. I'm a developer myself, albeit working in a different arena, so I do appreciate the amount of time and effort it takes develop - and critically to support - any technical project, especially one targeting the general public. I don't personally "expect" anyone to do take it on, but there have been (approximate) parallels in other projects when the primary stakeholder has taken it down a direction which deviates from that of the established community. So I suppose my question is more one of whether, in the case of the Squeezebox system as a whole, this even exists as a theoretical possibility, from a legal and technical standpoint. As for a new business entity taking it on, well I'm sure most people here would wish any such venture the very best, but with my objective hat on I'm not sure I can yet see a strong enough commercial case - one that would stand on pure business merits, independent of 'blind' enthusiasm for the product (I've been at the sharp end of running a tech start-up and learned some hard but valuable lessons on that front... ;)) I would love to be proved wrong however. With that same hat on, blasphemous as it may sound, I think I would have to say that Logitech is probably doing the right thing for its shareholders. It's a business, its sole reason to exist is to sell 'product' and extract money from customers. They already have my money, job done. Now to continue that they need to widen their appeal, which almost inevitably means disappointing one niche in favour of a much larger one. Now, I say they are probably doing the right thing - as far as intent is concerned. Whether their implementation of that intent hits the mark commercially - the products, support and marketing they come up with - remains to be seen. They will be exchanging one problem (geeky niche customer base) for another (saturated, highly competitive mainstream). Whether they can make that fly will be up to them. That new direction may not be personally interesting to me, but Logitech doesn't exist for my benefit. :) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ tigersim's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=11362 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=96572 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/discuss
