Cutting this important part out of another discussion ... On 10.11.2008, at 20:49, Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote:
> Of course, this all supposes the open source model. If someone gets > paid > to do a Python Etoys or a GNU Smalltalk one then I wouldn't be at all > surprised to see a good quality implementation created from scratch in > just a couple of months. I have been thinking about this for quite a while - how valid is the assumption that a volunteer community would be able to create software that they do not intend to use themselves? For example, Etoys development was not driven by volunteers, but by a small research group around Alan Kay with paid developers. It is open- source and free, but we get relatively few contributions from volunteer developers. This is in contrast to Squeak, the underlying system, which is supported and advanced by a thriving community of developers. But the majority of the Squeak community is not interested in Etoys, just in the Smalltalk development system (which they use and improve for themselves). I see a similar issue with Sugar - since no-one seems genuinely interested in making it their own environment, but rather developing it for someone else, progress pretty much is made only by the (unfortunately few) paid developers. The few parents / teachers who might want to contribute are not savvy enough to actually do so. Is there an example where volunteer-driven development succeeded that was not of the "scratch-your-own-itch" kind? If so, what can we learn from them? - Bert - _______________________________________________ IAEP -- It's An Education Project (not a laptop project!) [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/iaep
