Important decisions that affected the work of many open-source developers were made behind closed doors... and suggestions from the open-source community were too easily rejected.
I think the lesson was that to have an "open project" you need to be able to partly relinquish control of the code to the community... the developers of IRCAM were trying very hard to achieve a "perfect" architecture, which is to their credit ...... but their tight control alienated the open source developers ... which ultimately killed the project.
Its scary how sudden a good platform can vanish, hope Cycling74 can sustain a while. But what happens to MAX/msp users when they are out of business for some reasons? Of course the software doesn't stop suddenly (maybe in the DRM future this might be possible) but perhaps going to break with the next OS update and nobody out to fix it. Vendorlockin at best or as the NNbots used to say, corporate slaves :)
Cheers,
Malte
Malte Steiner media art + development -www.block4.com-