I started reading with interest the October 2010 STEPS Progress Report, then as soon as I got to the first screenshot, was overcome by a familiar feeling of depression: I strongly suspected, and quickly confirmed, that there was no code I could try.
We've been over this ground in the past, and have seen two related arguments for not following the dictum "release early, release often": 1. "It's not ready". 2. "We don't have time to support people trying to build non-production code." To which the answers are, respectively: i. You don't understand "release early, release often". ii. You don't understand "release early, release often". Subscribers to this list do not, on the whole, care if code coming out of VPRI is buggy, non-portable, pre-alpha, or will only run correctly at a certain phase of the moon. We will quite happily help each other build and play with it. We understand that you have better things to do than support it, and also that in a few months time you may have thrown it all away and started again. I, personally, often don't even try building such code; I just want to know that other people can! You still seem to be stuck in the mentality of wanting to produce a finished product. But in computing we all know there is no such thing. Releasing unfinished, half-baked code will NOT turn people off. In fact, the effect is exactly the opposite: a huge marketing WIN! If you still doubt me, just look at the number of questions about building Ian Piumarta's idst repo, which has only seen one, trivial, commit this year. Releasing a technical report on software without code is like publishing a review of a new piece of music but not the score: it's tantalizing, but essentially useless. By waiting until you think you have something worth releasing, you are losing years—YEARS!—of free marketing and buzz. And you need it! Competitors doing merely evolutionarily cool stuff will consign your entire project to the dustbin of history, if you don't get people excited about what you're doing, and if we're lucky, someone else will pick up the ideas in a few decades when they have dwindled to a mere stepwise advance, just before they become actually redundant. The history of computing is littered with just such lost opportunities; please don't become yet another. -- http://rrt.sc3d.org _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list [email protected] http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
