[uae] UAE, E-UAE, FS-UAE: One man forks of WinUAE, why not form a team and merge efforts?

From: timofonic timofonic <timofonic@xxxxxxxxx>
To: uae@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Wed, 30 May 2012 23:48:34 +0200

We have FS-UAE, E-UAE...

While FS-UAE looks promising (and more multiplatform focused, better in my
opinion), it seems to suffer the one man programming project syndrome. This
is unfortunately quite common outside the Open Source culture, and can
occour even if the project itself becomes Open Source if the community
culture is not spreaded correctly.

There are two nice sources if you want to read in more depth about this:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/06/in-programming-one-is-the-loneliest-number.html

http://www.producingoss.com

Do I mean big projects like this need to be more collaborative? Yes
Do I mean projects like this should collaborate and cooperate or even merge
if possible with similar ones? Of course.

But this should also be explained and discussed by all people in the
community, because a project like this (writing an Amiga emulator, a
difficult hardware with different flavours and revisions) is not easy to
realize and a proper team of people with a more open development model can
show great benefits (look at LibreOffice, their code modifications are
approximately 700 percent more than the ones of OpenOffice.org and a lot
than Apache OpenOffice too).

This happens with other projects, some of them merge with others and become
"metaprojects" in some way. But in this case an Amiga project is more than
big enough to get a critical mass in my opinion, also there's little to
share with other projects other than the 68k and PowerPC JITs (but that
piece of code should be shared too).

This is also the problem of projects like MAME and MESS, they are open but
follow a somewhat closed development model. The problem is that it's more
an elite club than a more organic organization, losing fuel and people with
different interests in the code (some people can look into more exact
emulation, others into optimize it...).

Most non-commercial and successful projects these days have an open
development model, multiplatform oriented and centered on a  collaborative
and organised team of people. I can show you. I can give you some examples
if you want other than LibreOffice, like ScummVM and Battle for Wesnoth and
other projects already participating in this Google Summer of Code 2012
(but that doesn't mean all of them are there, some of those are outside of
it).

I was just going to say this any of these days and wrote that. I hope other
people see it with an open mind, I'm open to critics and argumentations
(insults too, only if they are funny).

Regards.

[uae] UAE, E-UAE, FS-UAE: One man forks of WinUAE, why not form a team and merge efforts?

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