Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Attracting Developers To Abandonware?
phlawed writes "I've been a Linux user since the previous millennium. I came from OS/2, which I really liked. I quickly felt at home with icewm, using a suitably tweaked config to give me something resembling Presentation Manager. I may have commented on that before. Today, I find myself in a position where my preferred 'environment' is eroding. The only force keeping icewm rolling these days is the distribution package maintainers. I can't code in any meaningful way, nor do I aspire to. I could easily pay for a supported version of icewm, but I can't personally pay someone enough to keep it alive. I'd love it if someone took a personal interest in the code, to ensure that it remains up to date, or to make it run on Wayland or whatever. I want someone to own the code, be proud of it. Is there a general solution for this situation? How do I go about drumming up interest for an old project?"
I have a mod stalker who is modding down my past comments and is too much of a cowardly pussy to admit it or face me.
No, you get modded down because you say idiotic things like this:
Now you know why 90% of FLOSS projects are crap.
Implying that this is different in closed source software. This is false. 90 percent of closed-source software is crap too. Sturgeon's Law applies everywhere.
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BMO
You might want to check into a class of crowdfunding sites that exist to fund features in free and open source software. The two main ones I could find are:
https://www.bountysource.com/
https://bountyoss.com/
It's called marketing. RubyOnRails wasn't the first web framework and it certainly wasn't the best. In fact, it was pretty shitty. But it was the first that had a professionally designed website that advertised its benefits and a screencast that explained and demonstraded them. The pratically invented screencasts. Weeks later slashdot was filled with Rails fanatics.
The first version of the Zope Webapp Server came out roughly a decade before rails and still was notabliy superiour to any other WebFW, Rails included, in all aspects. Yet nobody cared. Why? That's why. Bland website? Nothing flashy? Can't find what I'm looking for? Backend UI without good looking buttons? Won't adhere to the loudmouths and hippsters and won't get attention, won't get critical mass, will lose eventually. It's that simple, even in the FOSS world nowadays (Rails actually sought to that, btw.)
If you really want to bring ICEwm (back) into the limelight, join the team, update their 12 year old website, bundle a new version with good looking modern themes and your tweaked setup, give it a new version number and do a little rattling on related online forums. Once everything is in place, tested, up and running that is. If you've done your job well, userbase will rise again and IceWM 2.0 will the the Hip WM of 2014. Fluxbox, a Blackbox fork, gained hippness status some years back the exact same way. Neat website, one or two nice little extras, screenshots, a well kempt miniblog and everybody went "Oh, look, new and shiny."
That's just about all there is to it. But don't you dare think good marketing isn't work and isn't worth giving as much thought as your projects software architecture. It's more work and - most of the time - even more important than that for the success of a project. Even in FOSS.
Good luck.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
While I generally agree that it's a huge WTF to think a consumer phone would be like that, when Android first appeared one of the most popular phones was the Maemo-based N900, a Linux smartphone that did indeed ship with a terminal client. Many Slashdotters seemed to consider it the pinnacle of phone design at the time, so it's perhaps not too surprising they were caught off guard by the notion that a Linux-based iPhone killer would have completely different priorities than preceding Linux-based phones. (Or, to paraphrase: "No terminal. Fewer buttons than a Nomad. Lame.")
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
You're expecting too much.
Android is just another embedded *nix. I'm happy that it's Linux. You shouldn't expect it to have a whole bunch of scripting languages, and unnecessary servers.
With all that said, it is a functional embedded system, where you *do* have the ability. to extend it do to all kinds of neat things.
They provided hooks to just about everything in Java. I'm not terribly delighted with that decision, but it's what they went with.
For most purposes, play is their package manager. For the majority of users, they'll never open a terminal. I do 99% of my phone stuff through the happy little touchscreen. That's the nice interface provided.
If you really want the CLI package manager, you'll find pm, which does just about everything you'd expect from a package manager.
You can get Apache, Perl, and pretty much whatever else you want on there. Is it going to be like developing for an x86 server or desktop? Not really. It's a different platform.
If you're going to be developing for distribution, and not just for yourself, I'd recommend about the Android way to do it.. If you're doing it yourself, grab a copy of Perl for Android, and enjoy.
If you're going to complain, well, that's up to you. At least research it a little.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.