Constellation

[Richard Gaskin]

Jerry Daniels wrote:
> And then there's the part you highlighted: the technical nuts and  bolts 
> of versioning, for which there are tools (Chipp's Magic Carpet,  for 
> one). I think it may be the non-coding part of team work that  gums up 
> the works IMHO. One way around that is for one person to take  a project 
> to a certain point where a commitment has been made as to  direction and 
> then the following becomes less like herding cats. The  "Burn the 
> boats!" approach it's sometimes called.
> 
> That's kind of what I thought I'd do with Constellation.

Good call, and reflective of how most successful open source projects 
work, or at least got started.

The "herding cats" aspect is why so many open source projects never get 
off the ground.  In contrast, projects as big as Linux and as small as 
the MetaCard IDE manage to run several years with sucessful releases 
because the project's founder conveyed a clear vision with a finished 
work, providing a mandate that focuses contributor efforts.

Without such a well-communicated mandate projects often languish in 
"analysis paralysis", like a painter standing before a boundless canvas 
wondering where to start.


> Also, in open source environs, SOMEBODY puts up some money SOMEWHERE.  

Yep.

Contrary to the complex theories of some open source advocates, in 
practice it turns out that even open source contributors need to eat. 
The "gift economy" only truly works when everyone gifts, but as long as 
it's only programmers doing the gifting it'll still take cash somewhere 
in the chain to put a roof over the programmer's head and food in her 
stomach while she's typing.

In America the definition of "socialism" has become distorted to the 
point that many misunderstand it to be synonymous with "communism".  And 
yet if we consider that most open source wares began life in 
publicly-funded institutions, in effect what we have is a form of 
"socialized software", in which a portion of the taxes we've paid have 
gone into starting GNU, Mozilla, and other public works.  Personally I 
don't mind this at all; I'd rather have the government displacing 
products from Microsoft than some of the other projects they undertake.

Even the Internet which makes all this possible was for most of its life 
a federally funded project until it was privatized by the Clinton 
administration in mid-90s.

Those of us working on smaller projects don't get federal funding, and 
IBM isn't cutting us checks either (yet, though I do believe AOL wastes 
a significant amount of its development budget by not using Rev; 
hopefully one of us will have the opportunity to explain that to them 
one day).

So instead we cover our development costs in any number of other ways, 
and one of them is asking for value directly from the user in exchange 
for the value recieved.  In a sense commercial software is arguably the 
most egalitarian funding model, as it asks the same contribution from 
everyone who choses to participate.

In conrast, the vast majority of people who benefit from open source 
projects never give anything in return (adding a whole other dimension 
to the word "user" <g>).

With devolution I've experimented with a middle path between gratis and 
commercial packages:  devo is free to use, but one can show their 
support by making a modest payment and get technical support and a 
limited license to the source to boot.

This model has worked well for me: it's brought in very little revenue, 
but since I make devolution for my own use and my clients it doesn't 
matter, as I'm free to build it however I like without having to 
consider the commercial potential of features, or invest heavily in 
documentation.

<rant> And as we've learned from watching SuperCard and Rev over the 
years, it doesn't matter how many tens of thousands of dollars you 
invest in docs, people will always complain about them even when you 
deliver more than companies a hundred times your size.  Indeed the only 
xTalks I've seen with few complaints about the docs were HyperCard, 
which had a plethora of third-party books, and MetaCard, whose pricing 
acted as a sort of whinge filter, eliminating virtually everyone but the 
professional developer. </rant>

I respect and admire your releasing Constellation as a commercial 
product.   For such a polished and useful toolkit your pricing is far 
below what it's worth.  With any luck your users will recognize this and 
buy a couple extra licenses to bring their contribution up to the value 
of what you've delivered to them. :)

--
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Media Corporation
  __________________________________________________
  Rev tools and more: http://www.fourthworld.com/rev