Sorry if this is getting a bit off topic. radish;368767 Wrote: > Forget about closing SC, it basically can't be done (legally or > technically). The open source model works well for this product and I > simply don't see any reason to change. > A closed source model would probably have to be based on completely new code which doesn't make much sense. There is no way legally to change the current SqueezeCenter code to a closed source model.
The only reason to change the open source model would be if Logitech decided to completely change the technology to something other than Perl. However, with the current crew this doesn't make much sense as it would be a huge investment. The question isn't really if this is going to continue to be open source, the question is if we will see the same involvement from the development community in the future. The interest of helping a small company like SlimDevices for free is one thing, doing the same for a large corporation like Logitech is a completely different thing, especially if development of the core is handled pretty much behind closed doors. radish;368767 Wrote: > > What Logitech have done, which incidentally I think has been handled > really well, is to reinforce their in-house team with skilled devs who > _can_ be managed and scheduled to implement core things which are > determined to be essential. That leaves the external devs to tweak and > add the kind of scratch-an-itch enhancements that are so awesome on the > SB platform and so missing with the competition. > I completely agree, this is very smart and is probably the only way to get economics and keep up with the competition. You have to have a in-house team that is large enough to take decision and do development based on time schedules and economic factors. The trick here is still to keep up the interaction with the development community if you like people to continue long term community commitments. There will always be developers available that make a single plugin they need and then disappears, but to make sure community developers stays communication is extremely important as I see it. Unfortunately, my personal feeling is that this is something that we see less of today compared to before. Just look at how discussions are handled in the "Development" section of the forum, many are left unanswered or without involvement from the Logitech crew. I suspect discussions still are happening among the Logitech crew but they probably happen behind closed doors. With a lot of community development there is a huge risk that schedules will slide and features not interesting from an economic point of view will get focus. This is something that is IMHO something that can be seen in many open source project. radish;368767 Wrote: > > Really? Never heard of a company relying on Linux? Or Apache? Or MySQL? > Microsoft are pretty much the _only_ major software company who haven't > done anything significant in the OS space, and many others (e.g. > Redhat) are founded on the idea. > You can rely on an open source project that already contains the feature you want, but it's hard to rely on that it will be finished in time with a new feature you want. Of course, the open source philosophy also makes it possible for you to personally get involved to make sure it gets finished in time. For closed sourced commercial products you can often get a planned release date, for open source projects this often doesn't exist (with some exceptions). Fortunately this is something that has been improved lately with SqueezeCenter as we now have a roadmap which at least contains the planned contents for the next release and also a planned release date. -- erland Erland Isaksson 'My homepage' (http://erland.isaksson.info) 'My download page' (http://erland.isaksson.info/download) (Developer of 'TrackStat, SQLPlayList, DynamicPlayList, Custom Browse, Custom Scan, Custom Skip, Multi Library and Database Query plugins' (http://wiki.erland.isaksson.info/index.php/Category:SlimServer)) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ erland's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=3124 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=56164 _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
