On 1/12/23 2:45 AM, Richard Bown wrote:
Consequently, I am reaching out to see if there are any stories or feelings
you have around using and/or contributing to Rosegarden that you feel are
vital and worth sharing. I would love to hear them. Feel free to email me
if you don't want to share on the list.
I haven't seen any replies on this list to your post -- hopefully you
received some privately and they were helpful in preparing your
presentation. In any case, I'm going to add my opinions (publicly) here.
I'd be very interested in hearing your analysis of the issues
surrounding open source software, particularly Rosegarden with its very
unique 30 year history. I'm unfortunately not in a position to travel
1/3 the way around the globe to attend FOSDEM (though it would make a
nice vacation!), so if your session becomes available online after the
fact please post any links to it here.
The current problem with Rosegarden -- and I do claim it is a problem --
is that development contributions have slowed to a crawl. Not counting
me (and it's debatable whether I count) there are only a handful of
(semi-)active developers. In addition, Ted is the single point gating
decisions on if and when merge requests make it into the codebase, and
the amount of time and energy he can devote to that Herculean task is
limited -- understandably so given his long history with and immense
contributions to the project. Maybe you could "come out of retirement"
and lend a hand. ;) ;) ;)
None of this matters if one considers Rosegarden to be feature complete
and its internal architecture and implementation without need of
improvement. I respectfully disagree on both points. But, yes, if that's
the conclusion then it's appropriate that Rosegarden "ride off into the
sunset" with only occasional/minor bug fixes and maintenance releases.
(In that regard Ted has done an exemplary job ensuring the code is
stable and crash-free.)
The "elephant in the room" here is Musescore. It's a very different kind
of open-source project, with (as I understand it) a full-time paid
professional staff and a large number of additional voluntary
contributors. In many ways I don't think open-source projects
can/do/should compete with each other. But, again in my estimation,
Musescore has moved far beyond Rosegarden, and consequently has a user
base that's orders of magnitude larger. Yes, the fact that it's
cross-platform, particularly to the Mac (music production is Apple's
final monopoly, having lost desktop publishing and photo editing a long
time ago) is a large factor in that.
What does that have to do with the current subject? Only in relation to
my claim that if Rosegarden stays in stasis, its use in and benefits to
the community will predictably dwindle over time. That's what I perceive
is happening now: There's a small group of active users, and Rosegarden
exists as kind of a "cosa nostra"/"our thing"/in-group club for them.
Which would be fine except that I think it has a lot more to offer, to
more people, than that.
I posted here (and you replied on the thread) regarding my fork of the
project. I refer back to that now as my "story and feelings" for
possible inclusion as a small datapoint in your talk. In any case, I
hope things go well at the conference, and again ask for a link if/when
your presentation becomes virtually available.
P.S.: I have an upcoming bug fix and new features commit to the fork
nearing completion, and (sigh!) another semi-major new feature planned
after that. Someday I'm going to get off this merry-go-round. ;)
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