Slashdot Mirror
How To Kill an Open Source Project With New Funding
mir42 writes "The OpenSource multimedia authorware project Sophie, formerly hosted by USC Los Angeles, may just have been killed by new funding. The original funding organization, Mellon Foundation, approved a grant to redevelop the four year project from scratch in Java. The grant was awarded to a Bulgarian company based on their proposal, which is simply an exact description, including the UI and the artwork, of the current Sophie. Being an OpenSource project, this isn't strictly illegal, but let's say, not nice and definitely not innovative, coming from a former sub-sub-contractor on the project. Some of the original, now laid-off developers started OpenSophie.org trying to salvage the project. As the current version is still somewhat buggy and slow, it might just be enough to alienate all potential users of Sophie to the point that nobody will even try to use the next version. Have others faced similar situations? How would you deal with a situation like this?"
Is this a legit question being asked at the end of the story? Or is this whole article a thinly veiled attempt to editorialize about an event the author disagrees with in an effort to drum up community support for his/her project?
It seems like Slashdot is being used as a hammer here, instead of just the normal server-blasting time waster we all signed up for. I don't like being used.
Install linux, problem solved.
It was a botched bidding process, obviously.
And wasn't there a community behind this project before? Why wasn't the funding given to them instead of a company in Bulgaria?
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
What exactly is the problem here? The old devs don't like something about the new project(the summary isn't clear what, and there's no article with more information), so they've forked it. Who exactly killed what?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I'm not even sure what the question is. So the project is being taken closed source? Or it's still open source but the original developers aren't included in the new plan?
From the description, it sounds like a fork is getting all the monetary attention - not unheard of.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
I dunno what the deal is... sounds completely legit to me. There's nothing in the GPL, or in F/OSS in general, that says that if you write something, someone else cannot come along with a better story, more money, more developers, etc. and take your code or even forking it out from under you and taking control of the project. They can also start selling support for it and making money off of it (even without additional development... just support it).
So you have something open source.
Someone takes it, throws money at it, and tries to do something with it.
This pisses you off, because they now have the resources to one up you on the project.
Excuse my ignorance, but I thought open source was supposed to be open and free so it would allow anyone to evaluate, use, improve upon, etc. a project, with the end result being better stuff for everyone.
If this company put up money to do something with a base they saw as promising, then they're doing exactly what open source is all about.
If your code/project is not covered by any license that forces them to keep it open source / attribute credit to you, that's your fault.
It seems to me your e-peen got butt hurt, and you're crying foul.
...might be "How To Kill an Open Source Project With A Crappy Web Site".
I took a look at OpenSophie.org, and there's nary a specific description of what the project is, no screenshot graphics, and the only documentation and examples seem to be embedded in downloadable .zip files.
I'm not saying that the project's good, or bad, or bogus, but from the website, there's nothing that makes me want to litter my hard drive with zips from an unknown, untrusted source, just to find out more.
Someone was apparently not happy with the current developers and gave the next job to someone else.
Dude, you had your chance. You blew it. By your own admission "As the current version is still somewhat buggy and slow" you programmed and released shit.
What on earth is USC Los Angeles? As opposed to another USC? There's only 1, which is in Los Angeles. There's a university that's part of the University of California system called University of California, Los Angeles, or UCLA. That's not USC Los Angeles either. By the way, it's USC that hosted this project.
A very similar thing happened to the Open Source video editor Jahshaka. Apparently some very dark interests were involved, because the author had to sign an NDA. Guess what happened later? The project stalled, and the author was forbidden to even talk about it in his own forums. This situation continued for more than a year, with everybody wondering how the project was doing, and why it didn't advance at all.
The peril is not the funding per-se, but the contract. When a company wants to pay you to develop your existing open source software, you need to be wary about NDAs and changes in the contract terms. ESPECIALLY if the company wants to retain the ownership of your work!
"Someone does nothing but copy the existing output and claim it's a new direction, and bamboozling the funding organization into giving them the new grant".
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Someone takes it, throws money at it, and tries to do something with it.
Except according to the OP they're not taking anything, they're re-implementing it from scratch in Java using the current UI as a guide. And it's Carnegie Mellon that's putting up the money, and who were (apparently) providing support for the original project.
Now that's not unreasonable, if there were problems with the original that CM couldn't resolve... for example, if the FOSS software wasn't going anywhere and they needed something that worked (which was my first thought reading the article). And, after all, it's not like there are no FOSS projects that have done the same thing (though if they target another FOSS project rather than a commercial one you tend to get some bad blood). On the other hand, it's possible that the Bulgarians pulled an end-run around the people at CM who knew what was going on and got some PHB to pull the plug on the FOSS project.
We don't know, and it's better to avoid jumping to conclusions... either that Sophie was stabbed in the back by the Bulgarians, or that Sophie was adrift at sea and the Bulgarians rescued it... without more information.
It's not illegal. You obviously think your project is better than theirs, so act like it. I suggest you spend less time whining that someone "stole" your idea (if you wanted to keep it, why did you make it Open anyhow?) and more time writing good software .
Whichever software is truly more useful to people will get used, and people will hear about it.
Grow a pair and get to work.
We may not imagine how our lives could be more frustrating and complex—but Congress can. – Cullen Hightower
First off, wtf is Sophie? Their page says it is "software for writing and reading rich media documents in a networked environment" and I am still as clueless as before? What does it do? I tried reading their user manual and gave up. It is utterly unclear. As best I can figure, they were making some sort of bastardized office suite. If so, why? Isn;t there enough of that already?
As for the question in the summary, what is their license? Both for the original project and for what this company is developing. Just saying open source is not enough when you are dealing with a fork.
That's about the fastest way to kill a project, yes.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Let's subsitute another better known entity as an example.
"The OpenSource office project OpenOffice, may just have been killed by new funding. The original funding organization Sun approved a grant to redevelop the four year project from scratch. The grant was awarded to a Bulgarian company based on their proposal which is simply an exact description, including the UI and the artwork, of the current Open Office. (Having contributed nothing new.) Being an OpenSource project this isn't strictly illegal, but let's say, not nice and definitely not innovative, coming from a former sub-sub contractor on the project. Some of the original, now laid off, developers started FreedomOffice.info trying to salvage the project. As the current version is still somewhat buggy and slow, it might just be enough to alienate all potential users of Sophie to the point that nobody will even try to use the next version."
Clearer? When you submit a proposal for new funding as a replacement for the original Dev team, screenshotting the existing features is a bit slimy.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
If they had a sense of humor the Bulgarian team would rename it Sophia...
But seriously, if it's taken 4 years to get to a "buggy and slow" version, what could possibly be wrong with doing a rewrite while keeping the UI? Presumably a lot of lessons learned could be applied to the new version, and there's nothing stopping the old devs from keeping their fork going. As others point out, that's the beauty of open source.
Wait, I know how to solve the problem! The original authors should have claimed exclusive copyrights to the source code and distributed only binaries. Maybe they could even file for a patent on some of their methods.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Carnegie Mellon donates moeny for Sophie development. Four years later, it's slow and buggy. Carnegie Mellon donates money to bulgarian group to rewrite Sophie in Java.
What's the problem, exactly?
Oh, and for an example of a similar situation (this time with software that's known), consider the Emacs/XEmacs split. Emacs development was slow, so Lucid paid their employees to work on it and contracted with one of the main Emacs developers (Joe?). RMS didn't like the direction it was taking, the copyright not being assigned to FSF, etc.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
They want to recreate the project by getting rid of all the original developers who understood the old code and are familiar with all of the design challenges and tradeoffs, replace them with the cheapest warm bodies they can find, and rewrite the whole thing using (what I'm assuming) is Java+Swing.
Is this really a story about an Open Source project imploding, or a for-profit initiative starting off with a disastrous set of software engineering decisions.
I can see why they made the decision, but re-writing the project from scratch was the death of the project right there. As also seen with Netscape, you never ever take a working code base and decide to re-develop it from scratch. Even if it is really really junked up, if it is popular, it will survive the re-factoring or transition little by little to a new language or platform (or UI or what ever). And then you can slap a fancy 2.0 moniker on it.
hi,
:) jahshaka (http://jahshaka.org/) was a open source digital content creation tool for film/video released at the start of the online video revolution. We had great hopes and we were pretty hot with 40-50k downloads a month and a active community. we won a few awards (best graphics software of the year) and intel contacted us saying they wanted to help out.
i feel your pain! funding killed my project... and herein lies my story
One thing led to another and with intels help we got £4 million from a tier-1 vc in the UK, under the terms that i move to the UK to be cheif evangleist (?). Sounds great right? Well for the first year 75% the funding went into the hands of upper management and their consultants (since upper management were clueless to open source).
Then they close-sourced the project, so with the communities help we tried to wage a war against management to 'open their eyes' and i ended up getting sacked for it - and left stuck in london with my family, wife and kids. And london aint cheap.
After the 2nd year (with no progress at-all, no new releases, and a failed attempt at build a CMS which was nothing to do with our project) eventually i was hired back as a consultant.
I immediatly directed as much of the budget as possible (turned out to be around 2 mil us) into building a fork of the underlying engine in the original project, called the openlibraries, under the LGPL. i took a back seat and directed this while i watched another CEO proceed to build a online video distribution system with the rest of our cash (also nothing to do with our project but whatever) with a goal of eventually getting my stuff back.
In the end i was able to use my consulting fees to buy it all back... for around £50k... only to find out that i had wasted 4 years of my life and was back to where i was when i got the funding. I got some cool tech out of the deal and some cool domains (http://plugin.com/) but it has then taken me the better half of this year to figure out how to get the project back off the ground.
so, if nothing at all, you can learn from mmy experiences. open source is not about money its about the people. if you want to build a comercial business then you need to make up your mind from the start.
hope this helps,
Jah Shaka http://www.jahshaka.org/
My guess: A wiki. I am not willing to wade through that website to find out more.
This is BTW a common failure of open source projects:
(a) Select a "cool" name which has absolutely nothing to do with the function of the software
(b) Absolutely can't be bother to explain what the "cool" thing is about, except stating it is "cool".
(c) Structure your website in a way that is only useful for insiders
(d) Invent own terms, never provide easy to find definitions, if at all, and provide information only in your own techno blah.
If the communication style we had to witness in the article is the same style the (ex) project owners used to "communicate" with their sponsors I am not surprised the sponsors went with someone the apparently understood better.
Notice that the Mellon Foundation is also one of the major sponsors of Zotera, the opensource replacement for Endnote featured on /. for bringing about a lawsuit. Not that there's a connection; I'm just saying that it looks like their philanthropic interest is in enriching/enabling scholarly discourse, not in coddling developers. Even the world of charity can be ruthless - people want their donations to change the world, not just subsidize some programmers. It seems some people are learning that open-source can easily work against developers, even when they're working on "good" projects.
Also, if it moves to Bulgaria shouldn't it at least be renamed to Sofiya?
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
They're paying to have a project that doesn't work well enough (by your own admission) rewritten completely so that it -will- work. Sounds to me like they're trying to save it.
If you want to prove yourselves, take the time to fix the current one before they have had time to completely rewrite it... If you can't, there's your real problem.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
It wasn't thinly veiled at all. Yeesh.
This is basically astroturfing.
No, wait. *coins new term*
This is bashtroturfing !
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
From Astea's web site:
Why is a team of the world's leading Squeak experts involved in a Java rewrite? The article summary may turn out to be a bigger troll than the one I'm replying to.
Clearer? When you submit a proposal for new funding as a replacement for the original Dev team, screenshotting the existing features is a bit slimy.
I still don't see the problem. What I read is:
Company gets paid to develop app that is the same as an existing open source app.
For f*cks sake, if people couldn't clone existing apps there'd be no open source movement.
It cuts both ways.
There's your problem. You just alienated all the developers.
No sig today...
They're insisting you rewrite it all in Java.
Way to piss off all the developers.
No sig today...
The new and innovative part is where the Bulgarians make it work right by re-writing it in Java.
Of course, if the Bulgarians fail and end up with a slow, buggy program, they have reinvented the wheel. If they succeed, it makes the original project members look foolish.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
OK then... Been to the opensophie site. All I can find is a page for the binaries where i686 version can be downloaded. Where's the source? Why can't I just do a configure && make? The linux version had DLL files inside the archive, what the heck?
I've worked with an open-source project that had a rough couple of years due to outside funding. The core of the problem is if the funding is for some work that may not really be all that interesting to the core of the community. You end up with a bunch of work that the core user/developer base isn't interested in and so it doesn't get as much TLC as other things that are features added by someone close to the project. After the pain of it happening and the few years of recovery the governing body for the project has started outlining better rules for funding related to the project and how it is handled to avoid the problem of this large external force knocking a project off track.
Apologies. I got my fruits mixed up. I must have been out of my gourd.
Dammit why is it when i read this kind of BS i start laughing so hard that i spit out a mouthful of fine wine on a friday afternoon???... God even my dog could compose a more veiled sales spiel such as this. Opens new bottle......
*--- Sometimes a majority only means that all the fools are on the same side. ---*
Just had to link to Dilbert, which seems to be paralleling this story ....
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Clearer? When you submit a proposal for new funding as a replacement for the original Dev team, screenshotting the existing features is a bit slimy.
But from what I can gather from the summary, the whole point of the grant was
to redevelop the four year project from scratch in Java.
So in theory it's primarily a language swap, and the features and GUI shouldn't change much. Basically, I think the screenshotting is actually valid in this case, and honestly should be the guide for the new work.
open source modern art: laser taggi
No, not really.
There must be some information missing somewhere, because neither version makes very much sense. The developers were laid off? How is that even possible on an open source project?
The confusing headline doesn't help, either. "How to kill an Open Source Project With New Funding". At first I thought it was going to link to an article showing an example of how increased funding had killed a project. Then I saw it was an "Ask Slashdot", and thought the poster was asking how one might go about killing a project with funding, which just made me confused as to why they'd want to do that. So I had to read the summary. Which just confused me further by being about a project I've never heard of, having nothing to do with the title, and asking questions with what seems to me to be fairly straightforward answers. Fork the code and get over it.
Maybe not
How would you deal with a situation like this?"
Interdiction with extreme prejudice
Maybe you should read the summary? "The original funding organization Mellon Foundation approved a grant to redevelop the four year project from scratch in Java. The grant was awarded to a Bulgarian company"
Dogs composing veiled sales spiels? Photos or it didn't happen.
-1 not first post
"Clearer? When you submit a proposal for new funding as a replacement for the original Dev team, screenshotting the existing features is a bit slimy."
I understood that the new vendor seemed slimy to the submitter from the original post - I did not need translation for that.
So he doesn't like the new developer - again, what is he asking? Is he looking to wrest control back? Is he trying to figure out a way to make his fork more popular than the "official" one? Overall, it comes off like my kids complaining that the gym coach took the new basketball and gave it to the mean kids, leaving them with the old flat one. Sucks, but...what?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
This is why the internet is wonderful.
I don't even know what "Squeak" is. Something to IceWeasel later. Today's vocab word FTW!
(Looking for new verb to replace "Googling".)
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
http://www.superstock.com/stock-photos-images/1749-118 for your amusement
*--- Sometimes a majority only means that all the fools are on the same side. ---*
"Slimy"? Why?
It makes sense to establish some details of the project they're porting in the proposal, does it not?
The fact that a product is released under an open source license does not mean that the project does not have a regular, paid development staff employed by the copyright holder. It may or may not also accept community contributions (but accepting community contributions, while typical of open source projects, is not a necessary feature of open source project: you can develop in a completely closed shop with no community involvement and still release under, say, the GPL and thus be an open source project.)
That's why I run a Volatile box and a Verified box. The volatile compy pseudo-lives for strange and wonderful things!
(Digression: This is possible. Create an Expert System that websearches the item to reverse-rank popularity. Then you can tag a Wonderful factor. Fun! Where was I...)
Oh yes. Sophie. Well it seems to want to create books, but apparently fails miserably at the Intuitive factor. I am unable to get any content into a New Book.
( [Magpie] Oh look, when I close, it "drops me into the Squeak Dev. Environment. That explains why they needed a Squeak team as the From side to port it into Java as the To side. Shiny![/Magpie])
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
The only reason I could see to do this would be if this app was of some use in Android! The the switch to Java would at least make sense! But since this thing doesn't look like something you would want to use on a phone, smart or otherwise! It doesn't make sense, as it already runs under Window, Mac and Linux, why do they need it in Java??
I think the summary said they were rewriting it in Java, which is bad enough. I don't know what it was written in, but if rewriting it in Java can be passed as an improvement, I am afraid to find out.
Maybe the original developers don't like Java. I certainly don't.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Unless you intend to retain all features while following a different architectural route in order to provide some significant advantage down the road.
That's not unheard of.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
So the problem basically is that you didn't get the money to do the work, and instead went to some company in Bulgaria? Was the original development funded? because otherwise, what changed? How is the project dead, since the bulgarians will keep maintaining it?
and who wants to get a job porting something to java anyway? (unless you were using something like Visual Basic before, what's the improvement?)
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
...got lots of answers I didn't want to hear. Hurts but helps. So now on to making Sophie fast and stable ;-)
situation like this?
Why, of course, it would be .... Sophie's Choice... hehehe
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Except for the part where they're doing a language swap at all.
Why?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
As Dean of the USC School of Cinematic Arts and the Principal Investigator on the original Sophie grant, I'd like to share my own perspectives on what's happening with Sophie.
Sophie 1.0 was and is a collaboration between our School and the Institute for the Future of the Book (IF:Book). Sophie is intended to make it easier for anyone who is interested in authoring rich-media ebooks to be able to produce professional quality output with minimal training. Bob Stein, head of IF:Book and before that the founder of the Voyager multimedia company, is Sophie's visionary, and a longtime colleague and friend. Bob and I approached Mellon (note: The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Program in Research in Information Technology, not Carnegie Mellon, as someone suggested) for funding because Sophie's core constituency is also their core constituency: people in higher education institutions, libraries, museums, arts organizations, and wildlife organizations who want to author interactive content that makes extensive use of text, images, audio, and video. Mellon supported the project on the same terms as all software projects it supports; namely, that the software must be offered under an open source license, and that we must work to develop a sustaining, open source community for Sophie as part of our responsibilities.
Sophie 1.0 is written in Squeak, a Smalltalk variant. It implements Bob's vision, does what was promised to Mellon, and does it well. As a 1.0 product, there is still plenty of room for enhancement, and we had always intended to approach Mellon for additional funding for version 2.0. Unfortunately, despite a lot of interest among individual faculty and a few small programs, the widespread institutional adoption necessary to form a viable Sophie 1.0 sustaining community was not happening - due in large part, our inquiries suggested, to lack of interest in supporting an enterprise software application written in Squeak. In the community whose support was most essential to Sophie's survival, everyone wanted a language that was more widely known and used; the largest single group of potential adopters wanted Java
There's a long story about how it happened, but the short version is that IF:Book and USC asked one of the contractors that had helped write Sophie 1.0 - a Bulgarian firm called Axa Solutions - to write Sophie 2.0 in Java, so that it could be adopted widely enough to become a self-sustaining, community-supported open source project. Sharing our concerns about adoption, and continuing to believe in the project, Mellon enthusiastically supported our decision by making a grant for version 2.0 in Java. Sophie 2.0 is not just a Java rewrite of version 1.0: it is a true version 2, containing all the lessons learned in version 1 and substantially extending the functionality, which merely happens to be written in a different programming language.
Let me correct some inaccuracies in the comments I have read so far. No, I don't consider what we're doing to be forking the project, any more than any version 2 is a fork of version 1: Sophie 2.0 will even feature backward compatibility with Sophie 1.0 books (as well as an improved file-format, one of the lessons learned from Sophie 1.0). Yes, our solution uses a Bulgarian firm, Axa Solutions, as a contractor, but that is not as much of a change as it has been made to sound; as I mentioned, the Bulgarians were part of 1.0 development as well. No, the Bulgarian firm is not closing the code: they don't own the IP, we do, and we have signed a contract with Mellon to make Sophie available under an approved open source license. No, this is not a commercial undertaking in any sense: this is two not-for-profit organizations developing open source software with the help of a charitable foundation, to be sustained by an open source community of not-for-profit user-institutions like colleges, museums, and theaters. Apart from Axa Solutions, which is a contractor to us in the same way the rest of the original Squeak coders were contractors to us (including, I assume
I'm sorry, mods, I'm sorry, Jah... but please hear me out. I had been waiting for that project for all those 3 or 4 years. I'm a strong open source and Linux supporter, and, if you read my journal, you'll see that I'm all for having drop-in replacements for GNU/Linux. So, here comes Jahshaka, promising us the all-wanted multimedia Linux revolution that hopefully will bring down to earth the "year of desktop Linux" (because without drop-in replacements, it ain't gonna come).
So, we wait, I actually try out the software (under Windows unfortunately because at that time Linux distros weren't what they are today, and Virtualbox wasn't there), it crashes, it keeps crashing, hanging... absolutely a hideous UI, it looked NOTHING like Adobe Premiere, which I have used to an extent.
All I wanted to do is to play around with a couple of Divx's in a timeline. Meanwhile the devs were focusing on 3D effects and whatnot, while the basic functionality was still missing.
And how the f*** do I make this thing work? It's not stable. Not yet.
So I wait, and I wait.... and I keep waiting... and waiting... and waiting... and nothing happens.
How am I supposed to feel? Yes, I've read the news, "we're back!" and everything. But what if it's simply not true? What if it's still a red herring to prevent other Linux devs from making a successful Open Source video editor? Because that's what happened during those years. People didn't start a new editor because they were waiting for Jahshaka.
I felt like a little puppy coming to a human who's offering it food, and then beats the crap out of it. So what happens then, when the VERY SAME PERSON offers the same little puppy (who's grown up now) some food? Yes. Snarl. Growl.
Like the AC above me, I still don't trust you. I've seen those openlibraries lying around... but I don't see any apps built with them - and I don't have the time or money to start fooling around with them.
Show us that they work. Make demos. Make tutorials. Release them. With source code.
At least I'll concede you one thing: Open source is about the community.
So, please, in all honesty, in the name of that betrayed community, give us a sign of good will. A sign that you're for real this time. Because you have a lot of bad karma (community karma, not /. karma) around you, and you really REALLY need to clean it up before we can trust in you again. Oh - and that link to videocore dot com ("The best video content management system on the planet, for only $99") in your website... it ain't helping.
Because 90% of developers understand Java, and maybe 10% understand SmallTalk. TIOBE lists SmallTalk as #36 in popularity with 0.123% market share and Java as #1 with over 20%.
Granted, TIOBE is based on search engine results, which aren't a perfect indicator of usage, but they are probably accurate to the order of magnitude.
http://silversoft.com/cineplay
There's your player. Where's the code? All I see is a Windows installer, an EXE. Open Source proponents (especially linux users) completely abhor executables. We want the source code. Why aren't there any links to the cineplay source code? Ah, there it is, in the little tiny link below the page.
OK, let's say I begin to trust you...
Your page looks professional. But TOO professional. It lacks the community feel.
If I had built your cineplay page, I would add a link to the forums, some screenshots, perhaps links to youtube video demos of cineplay in action, direct links (with big shiny buttons) to the source code project page so people can submit bug reports or request features (hmmm.... http://trac.cinefx.org/report/2 has no tickets.
See what I'm talking about? The whole Jahshaka project is tainted. It reeks of hype and venture capital. What's more, it looks like EVERYTHING THERE was made by yourself, and ONLY yourself. Where's the community? It still looks like it's a one-man project - and that's a hair apart from being a closed source project or an abandoned project.
You need to start from scratch. Not the code, but EVERYTHING ELSE. The webpages, the forums, the tracker, EVERYTHING. Wipe out those commercial pages and delete ALL the hype. Become more humble. Get a sourceforge page, and that's not optional. Sourceforge is mostly where the open source community resides. If you don't like sourceforge, try to submit it to Google Code. Or at least submit your project to freshmeat. In short, tell the community you're not a ghost.
Delete the old forum or post an announcement saying it's deprecated. Start a new forum, a clean one. Add subforums for each of the projects (cineplay, openlibraries, etc). Make it clear and uncluttered (and please don't use those ultra-commercial-hype near black tones, they disturb reading).
Start inviting other programmers to join the community (or actually the opposite), start researching around in mailing lists, other forums, to see what other video editing projects are there (maybe you've already been contacted by someone from those projects and you haven't even noticed, who knows), try to help them out...
Say "I'm sorry, it was my fault. Will you accept me again?". And say it with deeds, not words.
Case in point: MySQL. All MySQL developers are paid employees of Sun (well at least the ones who have commit rights). The OpenOffice.org is an example of where Sun pays staff to work on an open source project as well.
I always wondered where this setting was...
Granted, but is this really enough to do a full rewrite?
Suppose it was a Ruby On Rails project. Would you rewrite it in JSP just to get more developers? Would the number of developers make up for not only the massive amount of time to do the rewrite, but the extra time taken to maintain it and develop it further, once the rewrite was done?
If the target language wasn't Java, it would make slightly more sense. If the original implementation was really, really shoddy, it would make even more sense. (Think Myspace.)
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
{
public void speak()
{System.out.println("Hello World");}
public static void main()
{
HelloWorld helloWorld = new HelloWorld();
helloWorld.speak();
}
}
Haven't bothered to compile that, but it's close enough for 4:30AM. If I wanted to be a pain I'm sure I could shave off a line or two. Anyways, what is your beef with Java? I've found most people that diss on Java fall in to one of the following categories:
For my own part, I program in C/C++, Java, perl, a bit of .NET, V(B/C)-6, and ADA is my guilty pleasure language (arguably the most well designed and implemented of the bunch, IMHO). If memory footprint and load time aren't an issue and I need to go cross platform, Java is just my only option. In the languages that I know, Java is second only to ADA when it comes to concurrency (I admit I've never done anything with multithreading in .NET, but I'm sure it's fairly close to Java in both design and implementation). So, what's your beef with Java?
.NET/Ruby developer and are therefore sworn enemies to Java developers ;)
Please don't misunderstand me, I'm not judging you by the fact that you don't like Java. I also completely understand simply not liking a language; I've just found that many times when someone starts talking about why they don't like Java, they don't really have a reason other than it's 'cool' to diss on Java. Or they're a
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Those who "get" Java definitely seem not to have any antipathy towards it.
Those of us who look at _good_ Java code and can think of ten other ways to do it, most of them more efficient, more explicit, more elegant, more expressive, more maintainable, more manageable, etc., have to fight serious cognitive dissonance every time we use it. The noise can be mentally deafening at times, or can simply cause a headache (or stomachache or other sign of mental distress).
I still don't get Java because every path taken in its design (and I do mean every path) contradicts my instincts. When I'm looking at some code that I have to take from here to there, none of my guesses take me anywhere. Then I go dig up source of something similar to what I'm doing, and it always takes me a few days at minimum to figure out what on earth the authors are doing.
And then there are the projects that have been killed by the penchant of the project managers to get lost in abstraction, primarily because they have the mistaken impression that abstraction will allow them to implement all the features the sales group has been foolish enough to agree to on the schedule the sales group has been silly enough to promise.
In other words, you mention being burned by legitimate bugs. I propose to you that Java is one big design bug from the bottom up.
As long as it doesn't become a monoculture (like Microsoft's stuff) I have no problem with that. All useful tools fail in certain ways. Good tools will be quite useable to those who instinctively understand them. Others may find themselves feeling like a lefthander using a right-handed pair of scissors. It becomes painful after a while.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
It seems like a really brutal way to enforce a fork.
It seems like a slap in the face to the original devs.
And I have seen projects that start with speccing an existing project out in Java turning into deathmarches.
I'd like to see the other side of the story, but not everyone who reads this guy's complaint is automatically thinking he has no valid complaint.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
You know, Mellon could have funded a Revolution and saved a lot of money.
I think I would assume, however, that they actually considered runrev and had reasons for wanting to depart from the Hypercard legacy.
Why head from Hypercard to Java, I'm not sure. Is Java 7 better at dynamic stuff than Java 5? Or have they discovered that attempts to generalize dynamic linking generally incur huge penalties in both speed and stability?
There's a reason Mac OS X is not written in either Java or Squeak (Smalltalk), you know.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Or maybe a little driving from the sidewalk, if you'll pardon me for taking the metaphor a little too far.
Question one, did you consider Runtime Revolution at any point in your analysis/development? What were the specific reasons for rejecting it?
I am not employed by runrev, I'm not even much of a fan, just a sometimes user. There may be valid reasons for rejecting Runtime Revolution, depending on what you are trying to do. But I strongly urge you and the entire team to be sure you understand what those reasons are, because you are going to be re-inventing a lot of wheels in many more ways than one.
Question two, has technical management clearly understood the issues underlying dynamic objects? Can they write competent, real-time time-line based multi-module code in each of Java, Smalltalk/Squeak, and Objective C? (And Runtime Revolution's implementation of Hypertalk, to be thorough.) Do they know what they (not just the Bulgarian team) are going to fight with when they shift from Squeak's object model to Java's object model? (Delayed reference resolution is not a trivial topic.)
Does everyone on your team understand the implications of Sun's move from Java 5 to Java 7?
There may be much more than sore grapes motivating the disappointment you are hearing expressed from the original team. You're literally trying to move the earth underneath your project. Business manager's instinctive reach for the mainstream or for the "cool" (whichever it might have been) is not a good technical reason for inducing an earthquake in the code base. They have to have more than that, or all the "acceptance" available in business circles really is not good enough reason for this kind of decision. When you let marketing determine the technical directions, you're doing the exact thing that most typically kills projects, and it is exactly what a lot of funding at an inappropriate time tends to do. (I've seen this personally. Watched a decent company bury itself in inappropriate funding.)
Trying to think of examples where this kind of thing succeeded, I can't. When Apple moved from Pascal to C, they were able to keep most of the underlying run-time and most of the documentation. The headers (the machine-readable part of the API) were a mostly mechanical translation from Pascal syntax to C, and that succeeds because Pascal and C are syntactically close. (Closer than C is to Java, really.) That was nothing near the kind of shift going from Smalltalk to Java.
Nevertheless, as you are probably aware, the original Macintosh code base has now been officially abandoned, as has the classic Macintosh UI and API. Apple succeeded with that precisely because they were not just kicking the version numbers up. They maintained compatibility through emulation (expensive, but cheaper than actually trying to maintain it in the API going forward) and they have now jettisoned the emulation. The only connection that remains is some of the user base and some of the engineers, and the name of the Company. You cannot take even a simple application written for Macintosh System 7 and run it on Mac OS 10.5 either under emulation or even by a quick re-compile.
I could go on, but I know I'm not even a passenger in the same car, so I'm kibitzing from way out of context. But I don't think I should just agree with the chorus of, "Forking is part of the reason for open source!" It is true that forking is part of the reason for open source, and, much though you may not want to see it that way, what you are attempting is most definitely a fork by any engineering definition. But forks are a bit beside the point.
If you are satisfied that you have checked all these issues, my comments are unnecessary. I offer them in case you haven't.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Thanks for your note: it's always great to see a reply from people directly involved which explains more.
'Clearer?'
Not really. Sounds like the original devs whining because they got canned.
The company is paying for a complete rewrite from scratch. Maybe they are paying for said rewrite because "the current version is still somewhat buggy and slow".
Seems reasonable to me, if you are doing a rewrite for optimization, move to a more modern language, and (hopefully) reduced bugginess new features really aren't a good idea.
It's currently written in small talk, and straight from the summary its slow and buggy now.
Java wouldn't have been my choice for a more modern language but its trendy enough I suppose.
'Granted, but is this really enough to do a full rewrite?'
Yes if its impacting development. Even if its not, the fact it is slow and buggy is certainly grounds for a rewrite.
BG company screws somone over? You missed a tag: '!news'. Seriuosly, near anybody over middle-class in BG isadirty scumbag of a senator (to put it up to scale with USians), and dont get me started with our local senate equivalent *hides AK-47 behind back*. /rant
I know tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack.
Thanks for clearing the thing. I was wondering about what Sophie was. It sortof reminded me of Alice. Then I saw your post, and the familiarities are astounding.
* Named from a feminine first name from children books. Check
* Authoring System. Check.
* Written in Smalltalk. Check.
* That are going to be rewritten in Java. Check.
Conclusion, Sophie will follow Alice on the path of irrelevance. Rewriting a Smalltalk app in Java swing is an exercice in futility. It will be a slow bugged mess, which is what Alice is now.
Of course, it will also suffer the second syndrom system, ie: they will try to cram as much as new ideas as possible in that version, and will fail (don't think that because the proposal says "the very same thing" that it will. No. This is not how projects work).
I read the summary four times. It's clearly written by an illiterate. If you understand that gibberish, please explain it in valid English.
Haven't bothered to compile that, but it's close enough for 4:30AM.
And you mentioned you know Perl. Hello World in Perl is one line of code -- two, if you count the shebang.
And while you did manage to complicate it further, it's never a good sign when "hello world" in a language requires so much infrastructure bullshit just to get started.
Trendy language snobs
I use Ruby on Rails at work, so I guess I qualify... but then, I've also played with Erlang recently, and I know enough Javascript to know it's a fundamentally better and more powerful language in all the ways I care about.
Don't get OO design
There's a quote somewhere that I'll have to find, from the person who actually coined the term "Object-oriented", who says that Java is absolutely not what he had in mind.
Of course, he was probably a bit more of a language snob, as he doesn't count Smalltalk, either. But Java is not the only OO language one could ask for.
Haven't seen benchmarks of Hotspot
I know Java is fast enough. I don't particularly care, for most projects, and Java is also living proof that if enough people like a language, they will eventually make it run fast. A more recent, clearer example is Javascript.
Has been legitimately burnt by one of the many serious bugs/design flaws
Can't speak to that, as I've successfully avoided it thoroughly enough that I haven't had a chance to. If I went back to it, I'd probably attempt to port some of the patterns I've learned elsewhere, and thus code around language flaws -- but I'd much rather code in a language that forces me to do that less. (No language is perfect, yet.)
Just don't like it (nothing wrong with that)
I really don't.
If memory footprint and load time aren't an issue and I need to go cross platform, Java is just my only option.
C/C++ are cross-platform, but it takes a recompile and a bit of awareness -- you need to choose cross-platform libraries.
Perl is cross-platform. .NET has official and unofficial implementations on other platforms, though the official Windows version seems to be the only complete one.
Or they're a .NET/Ruby developer and are therefore sworn enemies to Java developers
Oh, I hated Java long before I learned Ruby.
My reasons range from objective, to subjective, to intangible. Perhaps the simplest: I believe software development is about expressing intent. The clearer we can express what we actually intend to do, not just the mechanism, the more elegant our code will be.
Java's syntax is relatively ugly. It makes it really difficult to write short, sweet code. And there isn't enough support for the kind of metaprogramming it would take to clean that syntax up.
Less code means it's more likely to express my intent, making it easier to understand, and it's also much easier to maintain and understand because of sheer (lack of) volume.
I also intensely dislike the explicit everything -- handling of exceptions really drove home for me just how insanely fucking verbose this language is, not to mention strict.
The simplest Hello World in Java that I know of, by heart:
Oh, and don't forget, it has to be in a file called Hello.java, or it won't work.
Contrast this to Perl:
Or Python:
Or Ruby:
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Java is actually playing catch-up with Smalltalk in a lot of ways, so I wouldn't call it "more modern".
The summary tells us that the program is slow and buggy. Smalltalk really isn't.
I suppose it would matter if, say, they wanted it to be 64-bit, and work with more than 2 gigs of RAM.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
'Java is actually playing catch-up with Smalltalk in a lot of ways, so I wouldn't call it "more modern".
The summary tells us that the program is slow and buggy. Smalltalk really isn't.'
Modern can mean many things. IBM PC's are still catching up to Amigas in many ways as well but I doubt you'd find many who would describe the Amiga as 'modern'. You'd probably have an easier time finding skilled Amiga users than skilled smalltalk developers.
So you're saying it's wrong for a closed source project to replicate an open source one? (note replicate in this case doesn't mean fork, or even port, it means re-implement from scratch)
From your chosen example, you appear to have no problem with the reverse scenario, since OpenOffice.org certainly does borrow some ideas from (and implements the document formats of) the (presently) dominant office suite which is decidedly closed source.
Oh please. Open source isn't better than closed source, it's just (somewhat) free. Internet distribution just means that the ways of making money from software (and for that matter, music, movies and that often overlooked engine of Windows popularity, computer games) are changing.
The internet is amazing and no one would ever want to go back... but hasn't anyone noticed that the Sophie project was about creating "books" from existing material? If the mechanisms of "re-distribution" (i.e. P2P, social upload sites, blogs and videos that endlessly recycle and "add value" to original content) continue to out-strip the means of making money from software and media, we're going to see more creative ways of making money (invasive DRM on media, games created for the purposes of legal entrapment) and less creative content.
I think the best way to view this is as evidence that some kind of equilibrium may establish itself between closed/proprietary/licensed and open/free. It reminds me of an old science fiction story where an alien race decide to destroy mankind by giving them a machine that can duplicate anything; mankind survives by reorienting its value system around uniqueness rather than mass production. Man I wish I knew the name of that story and the author, but I read it before I was able to fully appreciate how smart it was, and before any of us could have known how relevant it might be.
I'm pretty sure any competent programmer can write good code in any language, and do it fast, including Java, but Java-only programmers seem to be almost as far from that as VisualBasic6-only programmers.
And using Java in your project seems to attract a lot of such programmers.
Besides that: what's the point of having a HelloWorld class and a speak method?
Your code seems unnecessarily engineered, just what a Java-only programmer would have done.
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.