On Wed, 30 Jun 2010, João Pais wrote:
naturally I get experience everytime I patch two objects together. but what's there now has only 5% of what it was in the first version (including a different design, to cope with some of the features I wanted to put in; and lots of features).
And then what ? I have "a patch" that is actually a long evolution in which everything changed except the result and, in some abstract sense, some pieces of formula. All the objects changed, even the file format changed (the original file was not in pd ; i made a converter so that at that point in time, I wouldn't have to remake the patch). It started nine years ago. It's just one example. I also rewrote lots of parts of my externals, and there's at least one external that I wrote _completely_ from scratch FOUR times, in 2001, 2002, 2008 and 2010.
Those are really not the only examples I could give, but I don't think it's necessary to give more. The 5% is irrelevant... many projects go through that... and neither yours nor mine are the biggest free projects to do so. There are methodologies that even expect all code to be in potential transience, over and over... « if it's useful, it's bound to be replaced ».
without counting on much of the effort put in just to (try to) make it usable by anyone - like having four possible spoken languages (and several are already on the list to be added later).
Ok, that really sounds like a feature of a commercial software, unless... what's the total duration of the soundtrack in each language ? Were any of them made by other people for the good of the project ?
which seems to pay off, someone said he just learned the syntax in a couple of minutes, and in 15m had put in his whole piece (not a big one, though).
Now, how can you use word-of-mouth to attract potential contributors ? If you can get other contributors, you can get more value for yourself (in non-money terms), which is something you can count in trying to make the project be more worth your time for yourself. But it's more difficult to do that in the Pd world than outside of it.
even if it's a bit optimistic, if this patch gets around, it can also help to disseminate Pd. but what I mean is that there are many people who really don't want to do more with the computer than send mails and browse. some of the work I put in was to cater for those people.
So, if you knew that from the start, why did you choose to work for those people for free in the first place ?
_ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ... | Mathieu Bouchard, Montréal, Québec. téléphone: +1.514.383.3801