With Ideasman42 stepping down, rise a lot question in my head about the future of FLOSS in general.
Let’s say it we all want the best in his new plans, everything he will be doing we wish him success and prosperity.
The big question that i m asking myself is where all this FLOSS thing is going? How to keep our keys developers? what should we do we, the community, users,
studios, everybody who is using FLOSS, to keep changeling the big incomes applications?
Ideasman42’s case should really give us all something to ponder about. Yes somebody might pick up his work and add some new stuff and so.
But we are talking somebody had been developing the app for about 14 years and instantly quit, i even remember talking (in IRC)with him the same day just before he sent
his email.
Ideasman42 is somebody that University people respects. He is the guy who implemented modeling tools that even paid app didn’t have. The guy who was doing it all, bug fix
new feature, mentoring people, moderator in BA, Blender stack exchange. Somebody with care, patience with people who he didn’t meet or see. If he deserves better can we
offer him better?
For the people who are saying working in the same code base for longtime is not healthy or it is really difficult, my question is how about all those veteran developers?
Is there some kind of plan to keep them motivated? Holiday? more School? should we have those kind of plans for our FLOSS devs as well?
What should we Blenderartists.org users do, I know many time while arguing here in the forum we forget that developers are human being as well, we just throw stuff, not really thinking about consequences, somebody else might read your comments differently and feel really offended. And some of us just want that last word in fight.
Is it a utopia to think that FLOSS may lead industry somehow?
I m really emotional now but i know that we are addicted to Blender and he will come back
It’s not very common for any application (FOSS or commercial) to have a single developer contribute to it for 14 years (outside of the project lead).
Commercial companies for instance tend to lose senior programmers on an annual basis and yet they not only survive, but the ones that have their priorities correct thrive and even grow. It might be that such news has a larger effect on FOSS in part because we have access to the commit logs and can see every line of code they touch (including changes you would never hear about if Blender was commercial instead).
I didn’t know that commercial lose their senior programmers on an annual basis that really unstable as an industry since i work with people who have been doing the same job for about 30 years (not programming)
@Lazy If you are wondering to know it a serious speech.
For one, if I was in his shoes I wouldn’t want people to open forum threads discussing and speculating about personal my decisions, so let’s keep this non-specific to his person.
Working ten years maintaining a single piece of software is a very long time. Maintenance is not the kind of interesting and rewarding work that you would do on your own motivation. It’s something that has to be done. The simplest reason to stop doing it is just that you stop wanting to do it. Stepping down as a maintainer also doesn’t mean leaving the project entirely.
Is it a utopia to think that FLOSS may lead industry somehow?
FLOSS leads in many industries, just not this one. CG is apparently too small of a niche to have large companies pump serious cash into developing a FOSS solution, when there are commercial solutions readily available. Then there’s the problem of inertia: Even if Blender was suddenly better in every respect than any commercial solution, those commercial solutions have a huge amount of training and in-house tooling invested in them.
Having said that, there seems to be increasing interest in supporting Blender. Blender doesn’t have to lead to be good, either.
Yeah… and in 10 000 years from now we will forget how to read & write. It is because of open systems and not hiding & keeping secrets, that majority is able today.
i think i can relate with your concerns @erick… it’s always sad to lose devs and artists. but it’s a natural process. the circle of life, if you will. Brecht was one good example… bishop too… etc
but the other side of it is that we’re also gaining new core devs and artists everyday… mike erwin for example. life goes on.
it’s definitely sad to see someone as vital as campbell (ideasman42) step down, but overall, there’s really no reason for any concerns about the future of blender