On 11/10/2014 09:00 PM, Brian Millar wrote:
> All I was saying was that it is the traditional hacker spirit to work
> on things purely for fun and because you want to without needing to be
> asked or offered a contibution fee, that's all.
Well, if you can gather us a bunch of those hackers, with extensive
knowledge of RT-audio coding, who are willing to help with LMMS
development for free... why not!
But the reality is, this is something LMMS desperately needs. It's not
just a question of "getting some fancy new features", it's about the
viability of LMMS as a project. The future of LMMS is literally on the
line here. Unless we can push LMMS over that treshold where it becomes a
quality product, a DAW that is suitable for at least semi-professional
quality audio work, it will forever be stuck as a niche product that
attracts newbies, who abandon it the moment they find it no longer meets
their needs.
I've talked about this before, but the problem is exactly this - as long
as LMMS is seen (more or less justifiably) as a "newbie product" or a
"hobbyist product" or even "a toy DAW", the userbase it attracts will
mostly consist of newbies. And when a product is only used by newbies,
there will be very little "customer retention" - as soon as the newbie
is no longer a newbie, their needs grow, they require more advanced
software... If LMMS is not able to deliver on that, they'll move on to
other, more advanced software.
And sure, we'll maybe get newer newbies to replace them, but again,
guess how many of those will be willing to contribute to development in
any way or form? The people who like to "hack" on a program are mostly
people who also like to use that program. Hackers are mostly people who
"scratch their own itch". If people keep moving on to "greener
pastures", who will be left to do all that hacking?
That's not the only issue... The current LMMS codebase is a huge mess at
places. There's so much legacy cruft, so many compatibility hacks, so
many misguided design solutions... we need to make LMMS smooth and
maintainable, so that we can get those guys with the traditional hacker
spirit to not recoil from horror when they browse the source code.
Again, I'm not saying that a paid developer is a necessity to make all
this happen. But it would improve the chances for success tremendously.
I don't want to see LMMS fade away and be forgotten, like so many other
FOSS projects do.
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