On Thu, Oct 5, 2017 at 2:13 AM, Ben Goertzel <[email protected]> wrote:
> I regret that OpenCog remains so hard to approach. In large part it > has evolved this way because the vast bulk of funding that has gone > into OpenCog has been oriented toward paying a small group of people > to work, in a hurry, on making OpenCog do something specific.... We > have not yet had a big chunk of funding dedicated to making it easy to > use as a platform. Hopefully that will change soon. This seems to be a very common theme with projects, especially with limited resources. Though OpenCog is unique in the sense that it has survived for so long with so many contributors, so the scale/extent at which this happened is somewhat larger and therefore require greater effort and coordination to really solve. I'm curious about a few things... 1) I know you implied this but I wanted to make sure: Do you see the goal of an easy-to-use opencog architecture as a high priority item? 2) Do you think that the specific architecture direction (modularization) presented by Ivan is generally the way that this should be solved? 3) Has there been any concrete work in mapping out a specific architectural direction to fulfill the goal of making opencog easy to use? 4) Are these decisions that have already been formally agreed upon by the governance of the project? Are there any dissenters among the core developers, to the extent that it might interfere with such plans if executed? I am not quite aware of all the details but I have been trying to keep up with all of the discussions lately in this group. Please forgive me if I am being too pedantic... My impressions are that funding would be easier to come by after these items are figured out in great detail and then incorporated as part of a proposal. Such a proposal could attract enough of the right unpaid volunteers too, as you know. But yeah, I am not claiming by any means to know even remotely close to what Ben knows on this subject. But from my vantage point, I am of the opinion that the monolithic architecture is what's slowing progress, and not the lack of funding. Suppose you get the funds and then you hire the wrong people, then you're even worse off than before because you probably wouldn't get another shot at funding for awhile. If it were up to me I would have at least one existing core developer be involved with this effort full-time, preferably whomever has the most knowledge in modular software architectures. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "opencog" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/opencog. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/opencog/CAMyYmr-T4gevcMh_2mYHko-YwuRcCK6dyBfGZVwYT%2BuizjH6PQ%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
