From: Luiz Petroni (lpetroni_at_compassoarte.com.br)
Date: Thu Apr 22 2004 - 19:17:26 PDT
Nicolas,
My point was that the project that DCL team is involved seems to be
really big, with very deep technnical aspects, hard to code/debug and
the final results are now and will be hard to achieve. This does not
seem to be the kind of project that will be finished with some code
programming during late nights or free weekends although you guys
should prove me wrong (I hope!). Every team member should be available
to dedicate maybe one, two or even three days a week with the necessary
hardware, software, information at disposal.
This demands money in a way that the donationware/opensource academic
approach should not supply. Unless there were tenths of users who could
help to develop the software. As someone pointed some weeks ago, the
active programmers with the necessary Newton knowledge in this list
maybe reach 10 or 15 people.
We, as a community, should find a way to support the project so that
the DCL team can focus on the project in order to provide a final
solution that will be reliable, fast, up with new technologies and with
the newton way. This should be achieved in a realistic timeline and the
final product should be released as single package or application. It
must be in a way that the average joe can simply launch the application
and use its drag and drop functionality to have things done.
Of course Escale, Delivery and the other parts of the suite are really
fine pieces of software and I'm sure they do work as expected and that
the project is in the right direction. They are fast, more and more
reliable as new versions are released and of course all the new
technologies available are being used whenever possible (as converters
to XML, etc.).
What I feel, based on posts on this list, is that all the DCL thing
still seems very technnical to some of us. Something that is really
cool, but that we don't understand exactly what to expect.
If the programmers have to donate time to finish such a huge project
this will be very hard to implent even with the community helping with
bug reports, hardware donations, trying to understand code that maybe
even the programmers feel hard to debug, testing, discussing, etc...
That was the reason I posted my suggestion. Maybe creating a
closed/shareware, fund or whatever to support the development could
help it improve and grow.
Please understand that all said is in a proactive way and that I'm
really impressed with all that was produced so far. Is up to the DCL
team make the final decisions about the project. For now, I will check
all your suggestions about how to help and see where I maybe will be
useful.
-lpetroni
Nicolas Zinovieff wrote:
> How would you feel if you worked on a present for a long time, and then
> the person you offer it to says "It's ugly, I'll pay you back"? :-D
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