Hi guys, I was very surprised (and happy) with all the emails I red yesterday on reply to my brainstorm. It was good to see many people agreeing and disagreeing with some points. For me, it was a kind of starting with the step 1 of gathering together and discuss the future of our software.
Id like to do a brief comment on some of the things people writed, and, at the end, propose something. [QUOTE] Fred Williams I was with you up to that point. Money is the root of all evil. It will totally corrupt the process. If you want money go to Micro$oft and develop for them. If you don't, (and I do realise that yopu may not have been referring to yourself), then why would you assume something like this? If this is to be a true cooperative effort, then let it be a volunteer effort. [/QUOTE] Some people might remember my name from this mailing list because of two frustrated attempts to make something while I was working with the ministery of culture from Brasil. One was to release bounties for the developers, and the other one was to bring Adam and Andraz to the International Free Software Forum (FISL) here in Brasil. Ministery of Culture of Brasil had (still has) a program in wich it donated computers and equipaments for multimedia production to lots of so called "Cultural hotspots" in Brasil. These computers would run only FLOSS and cinelerra was among it. What I was trying to do was to change the ideia and the action of the ministery of looking at FLOSS as Free as in free beer; that if a ministery was using these softwares, specially multimedia software that has a lack of investiment, it should put some money in it. Some people understood that, but it was not enough. This example illustrates how lots of sectors of our society are dealing with Free Software. This is what we have to change. I think we are learning it. And of course we can not only complain. If someone wanted to put money in cinelerra today he would probably think twice, because he/she would find the community a mess. But if, instead, he/she finds a well organized community, with all the means to his/her money get through, it may happen easily. By "all means" I mean, for example, a PayPal donate icon (very simple), or a real Institute, foundation or whatever capable of gathering money and distributing it (very complex). More Over, not only institution can put money for this to work, but users. I think we are starting to see the possibility of a descentralization of economy. There are lots of examples on the web, lots of people, paying few, intead of one institution putting lots of money and burocracy to the process. And the goal of this all is to have have happy coders, working together with the community, capable of dedicate healthy time to it. [QUOTE] Richard Spindler When "planning" a project, I prefer to make an Assessment of the resources that I have available first, because I somehow like to be realistic about what really "can" be done instead of building castles out of air and then being disappointed that it did not work out. Cinelerra is a to BIG "problem" to be solved by a single team. There are however a number of interesting technologies in cinelerra and in video editing in general that might be useful for communities outside of the core interest group. Therefore I think a viable way would be to break the big "cinelerra" problem down into a number of smaller problems, that can then be tackled by smaller teams, which can then work more efficiently. [/QUOTE] I strongly agree with that! [CODE] Herman Robak What to do? 1) Compete fiercely to get as many coders as possible to join either camp (Cin2 or Cin3) 2) Decide a parallell roadmap where Cin3 is poised to replace Cin2 _when it's ready_, and Cin2 is maintained until then. [/CODE] This sounds good as long as the patches (bug fixes/new features/interface improvements) done to cin2 could go smoothly into cin3. Is it reasonable? I think much of what Ive written that must be done, the guys working at cin3 are doing. But I see they doing this in a spirit of "lets work, dont talk", wich is good. But I also see this as an example of the state of the community as a whole: I will do this work, but please do not ask anything, if you want to do something, just do it. No one wants to promess anything. And this is fair enough. But my brainstorm was a reflexion on how we could change this to a scenario where users and developer know what they can expect from cinelerra in the next moths/years. This would be great, and that leads to my proposition, wich is nothing simple or magical, but basically organizing the community. This time we dont depend on external forces (as I did when in the ministery) but only in the community. I think we could give it a try to go after money for cinelerra. This could be done in various ways, but perhaps the simplest is to have a Paypal account, aks for donations and, more important, subscriptions. But how would we manage the money? Well, this is a discussion, but I got some ideas. Christian said that, since its a free project, people must understand that some developorers will get paid, while others wont. This is right. But actually I dont believe everyone wants to make money out of it, because this means they will carry a responsability. So perhaps we could ask. Who thinks would be albe to spend some time on cinelerra and be happy and responsable for gettin money for it? How much? How many time? Maybe we find out that nobody is up to take that risk. Maybe lots of people are... Maybe there is one. Then we could launch a call for contributors with a goal to be achieved. If we get it, cool! If we dont, things might just stay as they are, and we do something with money collected so far (maybe donate to Adam would be fair...). Nothing of this are original ideas. Several softwares use systems like this. If there are more than one developer, how to split the money is also a complicated question. But I think it can be done. Well.. innocent ideas ready to be beaten.. I can help working on the website. We could set up a wiki and have stuff like Rating bugs, and rating feature requests etc. (I do some php and mantain couple of wordpress plugins at http://pirex.com.br/wordpress-plugins, wich makes me very happy cause then I dont just talk about and use free software). cheers Leo,, -- leogermani.pirex.com.br leogermani.estudiolivre.org
