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Kdenlive Developer Jean-Baptiste Mardelle Has Been Found
jones_supa writes "A month ago there was worry about Kdenlive main developer being missing. Good news guys, Jean-Baptiste Mardelle has been finally reached and is doing fine. In a new mailing list post by Vincent Pinon, he says he managed to find Mardelle's phone number and contacted the longtime KDE developer. It was found out that Mardelle took a break over the summer but then lost motivation in Kdenlive under the burden of the ongoing refactoring of the code. Pinon agreed that there are 'so many things to redo almost from scratch just to get the 'old' functionalities'. The full story can be read from the kdenlive-devel mailing list. After talking with Jean-Baptiste, Vincent has called upon individual developers interested in Kdenlive to come forward. Among the actions called for is putting the Git master code-base back in order, ensuring the code is in good quality, provide new communication about the project, integrate new features like GPU-powered effects and a Qt5 port, and progressively integrate the new Kdenlive design."
An open source project stuck in "refactoring hell". Seems to have happened to Inkscape too. Such a waste.
Heavily refactoring projects of this size rarely brings any benefit for the users, it's just technical masturbation. If you're lucky, you will after a few years end up with a project that does the same things as before, most likely it will have acquired some bugs as icing on the cake.
Taking a few years to refactor your project might sound like a good idea at first, but chances are, you won't even be relevant anymore by the time you're done.
Some open source projects would benefit from proper managers who can stop them from shooting themselves in the foot.
it's a mature enough product that a kickstarter could probably raise the funding needed to get the work done :).
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...you assume something horrible has happened to girlfriend.
People like to be left alone a lot more than controlling types hope, and assume their silence must mean the worst.
Sometimes when a girlfriend or wife stops speaking to you, you count your blessings and leave well enough alone.
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Would things have been better if the project was financially sponsored better? Mardelle might have been much more motivated to continue the work on the refactoring and, he might not have just disappeared because of "what's there for me in it".
It's still a bit worrying how things are arranged in open source if the lead developer of a major KDE video editing suite can just disappear on a whim and later just say "nah, I didn't feel it anymore". He didn't even write a "guys, I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed" message but made people worry if something bad had happened to him.
What would happen if the lead developer of Apple's iMovie just didn't appear at workplace after his summer break?
Anyone with a little empathy.
7+ billion people found to not contributing as Kdenlive main developers have continued to not respond regarding their total absence from the project.
Why is everyone worried about the guy who gave the most already leaving? There are literally billions of people who gave nothing, and they haven't justified their continuing to do so. If you don't want to work on any particular project donating your time to the world, that is not a problem, its simply a lack of giving an undeserved gift to the rest of us.
I suspect this guy was driven from the project that he loved by the burden of it. That hurts him far more than it hurts us, so yes, we should have empathy to him: he gave is great gifts, and now suffers for it. Thank you Jean-Baptiste Mardelle: I don't know what the hell Kdenlive is, but it looks opensource, and a lot of work, so I'm glad to have more code out there for people to use.
Found alive having a life. More news at a 11.
Kdenlive is essentially one guy's hobby project. Blender has a number of professional developers working on it full time. Both are open source, but it's really an apples-to-oranges comparison.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Well, technically not. I mean that it would have been ethically fair to let others know.
It will disappear? How so? Is Microsoft going to force people to uninstall it?
I don't agree. Someone can up and leave a personal project any time they choose. They should not be obligated to prop up anyone's feelings.
Nice try at goalpost shifting. So now do you care to show how it will "disappear"?
It makes it different because there was other people involved and Kdenlive has a status of being an important software.
I'm sure he still maintains some interest in KDE and reads the tech news..chances are he saw the initial brouhaha regarding his absence and ignored it.
Way to embarrass him...this whole adventure, from beginning to end, reeks of a serious lack of basic communication and social skills.
They were clearly doing it wrong or something.
Code reuse? Readability? Maintainability? Wasn't OOP suppose to solve that?
It was supposed to help. It turns out writing reusable software is very hard to do. Though OOP is only one technology that has promised more than it can deliver.
I remember when I first learned about COM in the mid 80's, and how revolutionary it would be. You just plug software components together like breadboarding a hardware circuit. I thought to myself "Great! I can just unplug the editor in my IDE, plug in a Emacs component and I'll be good to go."
Seems like we should be able to do that, doesn't it? Needless to say, it's near the end of 2013 and we are nowhere close to having that functionality for either the developer or user. Ah, well.
If somebody pays me for three months to re-invent the wheel then I can cope with that. OTOH 'why' volunteer when so few join in and make it a party of like-minds in an orgy of better engineering?
For me a lot of programming is like playing with a model railway. It's an intellectual and artistic diversion where detail matters... ...Which is why I can't understand the 'open for gacking' methods of Git/Guthub. I want newbies to be mentored then directed then become part of a team that knows how to jointly own an objective and share the methods.
There's a word that describes what happened exactly: Gafiate. Gafiating is sort of like taking a vacation, but it's a vacation from your hobby or other spare-time activity, such as working on OSS projects. Sometimes, you just have to walk away for a while until the interest comes back. If nothing else, it's good to know that there's nothing seriously wrong.
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Exactly. Both are unmaintained. In other words, there's no advantage to the open source project over the proprietary one if neither is maintained.
Ah yes, thus reinforcing the stereotype of programmers as have zero empathy for others.
It still makes no difference because he still do not owe anything to people who have decided they find his work important.
I certainly think he owes. Not juridically but as part of having good manners.