Jerry Daniels wrote:
And then there's the part you highlighted: the technical nuts and bolts
of versioning, for which there are tools (Chipp's Magic Carpet, for
one). I think it may be the non-coding part of team work that gums up
the works IMHO. One way around that is for one person to take a project
to a certain point where a commitment has been made as to direction and
then the following becomes less like herding cats. The "Burn the
boats!" approach it's sometimes called.
That's kind of what I thought I'd do with Constellation.
Good call, and reflective of how most successful open source projects
work, or at least got started.
The "herding cats" aspect is why so many open source projects never get
off the ground. In contrast, projects as big as Linux and as small as
the MetaCard IDE manage to run several years with sucessful releases
because the project's founder conveyed a clear vision with a finished
work, providing a mandate that focuses contributor efforts.
Without such a well-communicated mandate projects often languish in
"analysis paralysis", like a painter standing before a boundless canvas
wondering where to start.
Also, in open source environs, SOMEBODY puts up some money SOMEWHERE.
Yep.
Contrary to the complex theories of some open source advocates, in
practice it turns out that even open source contributors need to eat.
The "gift economy" only truly works when everyone gifts, but as long as
it's only programmers doing the gifting it'll still take cash somewhere
in the chain to put a roof over the programmer's head and food in her
stomach while she's typing.
In America the definition of "socialism" has become distorted to the
point that many misunderstand it to be synonymous with "communism". And
yet if we consider that most open source wares began life in
publicly-funded institutions, in effect what we have is a form of
"socialized software", in which a portion of the taxes we've paid have
gone into starting GNU, Mozilla, and other public works. Personally I
don't mind this at all; I'd rather have the government displacing
products from Microsoft than some of the other projects they undertake.
Even the Internet which makes all this possible was for most of its life
a federally funded project until it was privatized by the Clinton
administration in mid-90s.
Those of us working on smaller projects don't get federal funding, and
IBM isn't cutting us checks either (yet, though I do believe AOL wastes
a significant amount of its development budget by not using Rev;
hopefully one of us will have the opportunity to explain that to them
one day).
So instead we cover our development costs in any number of other ways,
and one of them is asking for value directly from the user in exchange
for the value recieved. In a sense commercial software is arguably the
most egalitarian funding model, as it asks the same contribution from
everyone who choses to participate.
In conrast, the vast majority of people who benefit from open source
projects never give anything in return (adding a whole other dimension
to the word "user" <g>).
With devolution I've experimented with a middle path between gratis and
commercial packages: devo is free to use, but one can show their
support by making a modest payment and get technical support and a
limited license to the source to boot.
This model has worked well for me: it's brought in very little revenue,
but since I make devolution for my own use and my clients it doesn't
matter, as I'm free to build it however I like without having to
consider the commercial potential of features, or invest heavily in
documentation.
<rant> And as we've learned from watching SuperCard and Rev over the
years, it doesn't matter how many tens of thousands of dollars you
invest in docs, people will always complain about them even when you
deliver more than companies a hundred times your size. Indeed the only
xTalks I've seen with few complaints about the docs were HyperCard,
which had a plethora of third-party books, and MetaCard, whose pricing
acted as a sort of whinge filter, eliminating virtually everyone but the
professional developer. </rant>
I respect and admire your releasing Constellation as a commercial
product. For such a polished and useful toolkit your pricing is far
below what it's worth. With any luck your users will recognize this and
buy a couple extra licenses to bring their contribution up to the value
of what you've delivered to them. :)
--
Richard Gaskin
Fourth World Media Corporation
__________________________________________________
Rev tools and more: http://www.fourthworld.com/rev
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