[openbeos] Re: 3rd Party Opportunities

Hi Simon,

I am writing this from my own perspective as a developer having tried to 
get to know other people's projects with which I would possibly be 
interested in helping them.

IMHO, the problem is rather how to get people involved. And I think many 
talented developers, who dive into big projects and need more hands, fail 
to realize how important it is to get certain aspects of their projects 
right. For example, it is very important to get the build system right, 
people need to find information easily about where is what and how to setup 
their build environment. For example, Nirvana has mutliple branches for 
each developer, and to me it looks completely confusing. I don't know where 
is what, and how to piece it together - *appearently* (to me) each 
developer worked on a different possible approach to the whole project. I 
couldn't get anything to build at all, and I unsuccessfully (until now) 
tried to get help with that. I don't mean to bash the project, I really 
know that the developers probably have very little time. So please, I don't 
mean to upset anyone, I'm just trying to get you to understand how 
important this is.
Yesterday I downloaded the source to Themis, and everything built out of 
the box. So my impression is much better and I *feel* like I could dive 
right into it. It also has more documentation of what the developers where 
doing. I know that it takes effort from myself to get involved with a 
project, but the people already in the project should try to not put up any 
extra hurdles that the people interested in the project feel like a 
complete waste of time having to bother with. Another example is VLC, where 
I really would have loved to fix some things in recent versions, but each 
time I tried, I wasted at least a *day* trying to set up the build system 
and then failed in the end.

I agree that there might be value in an umbrella organization, but on the 
other hand, I feel like we already tried that (BeUnited) and it didn't 
produce these apps in the end. I would like to tell some people looking for 
help in their project to try and download their source on a clean system 
and figure out what kind of problems interested outsiders will run into, 
and then fix or document these problems. They are much more likely to get 
help that way. We *do* have some people interested to help in our 
community, but everybody needs to make an effort not to waste their own 
time (by failing to make it's existance known properly) and the time of 
other people.

Another suggestion would be to use the haiku-os.org blog system more, so 
that we have a central place for publishing such news and developer tales. 
I think it would be beneficial, because IMHO the places on the web where 
something BeOS/Haiku related happens are too spread out. Maybe it's just my 
ignorance, but I learned about the existance of Nirvana maybe two years 
after the fact... and I do try to read the news sites regularily.

Best regards,
-Stephan

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