tebe Posted October 13, 2022 Share Posted October 13, 2022 2 hours ago, flashjazzcat said: Yep, especially since we woke up this morning to discover a brick had been thrown through our front window during the night What is the city, district where bricks are flying ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mickster Posted October 13, 2022 Share Posted October 13, 2022 3 hours ago, flashjazzcat said: Meanwhile, I'll just go order myself one of those open-source UNO or Ultimate carts. Oops... no can do. They're sold out, and haven't seen an iota of continued development since they were released to the public. Wow, I didn't know those were out of stock (I bought a Ultimate cart a few years ago that I use). Is this due to chip shortages?? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
desiv Posted October 13, 2022 Share Posted October 13, 2022 20 hours ago, flashjazzcat said: I cited the number of lines of code written not as a means of 'bidding', but to illustrate the enormous amount of 'continued development' already (and continually) undertaken OK, unrelated to this thread, but that reminded me of one of my favorite (hopefully true, but probably not) dev stories... As I was told, when IBM was having Microsoft write OS2 (yeah, that was weird, but..) IBM paid by lines of code (or K of code, so by thousands of lines)... One day, some of the Microsoft devs were excited because they came up with a much more efficient way of doing something, saving LOTS of code. When they presented their findings, IBM said "Great! Less code, so we will pay you less.." And I'm sure that was the end of the efficient coding... TBH, that story sounds a bit fishy to me. But knowing IBM back then, I can see part of it being based on truth... 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TGB1718 Posted October 13, 2022 Share Posted October 13, 2022 (edited) I used to write programs that could "write programs" (well about 90% of a working program) reduced development of coding a new transaction from 2 weeks to a day with a reduced chance to introduce bugs. Edited October 13, 2022 by TGB1718 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
E474 Posted October 13, 2022 Share Posted October 13, 2022 Am not clear on why @candleand/or @flashjazzcat aren't building boards themselves (or should I say, assembling boards shipped from China)? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mickster Posted October 13, 2022 Share Posted October 13, 2022 15 minutes ago, E474 said: Am not clear on why @candleand/or @flashjazzcat aren't building boards themselves (or should I say, assembling boards shipped from China)? Most likely because they don't want to bother with end user transactions, stock and supply, manufacturing issues, warranty, shipping etc... Sorta like when an artist writes a song, he doesn't want to stand in walmart stocking shelves with his music. 5 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Stephen Posted October 13, 2022 Share Posted October 13, 2022 15 minutes ago, E474 said: Am not clear on why @candleand/or @flashjazzcat aren't building boards themselves (or should I say, assembling boards shipped from China)? It's not easy to mass produce components that are all SMD based. My guess regarding why not sourcing from China, is the quality is normally shit, and they steal / clone everything. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tillek Posted October 13, 2022 Share Posted October 13, 2022 32 minutes ago, Stephen said: It's not easy to mass produce components that are all SMD based. My guess regarding why not sourcing from China, is the quality is normally shit, and they steal / clone everything. ... and then let us not forget the whole "running a business out of your home" thing which some governments make more difficult than others. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
snicklin Posted October 13, 2022 Share Posted October 13, 2022 I don't know if it is still applicable, but I am sure that there used to be an EU law that made building electronic devices unfeasibly difficult. I remember that the Raspberry Pi people had to do something with the lawmakers to enable them to bring production to Wales. I don't know if that law got dropped or amended or they got around it by no longer being in the EU. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ivop Posted October 13, 2022 Share Posted October 13, 2022 (edited) 12 hours ago, tebe said: when you share the source code, miracles happen This. A lot of stuff I open sourced has been picked up by others, too. And 50 forks, like someone said in this thread? Nah, never happens. Edited October 13, 2022 by ivop 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+DrVenkman Posted October 13, 2022 Share Posted October 13, 2022 32 minutes ago, ivop said: And 50 forks, like someone said in this thread? Nah, never happens. Even little old RespeQt has nearly a dozen. And no public release in 2-1/2 years. I absolutely do not doubt that bigger, more lucrative projects (*) exist that have many more forks that this. (*) Contrary to common belief, "Open Source" can make a lot of people a lot of money: dedicated paid support, hardware sales and support running said open source code, etc. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tillek Posted October 13, 2022 Share Posted October 13, 2022 38 minutes ago, DrVenkman said: (*) Contrary to common belief, "Open Source" can make a lot of people a lot of money: dedicated paid support, hardware sales and support running said open source code, etc. Very true... but how often is it the developer? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+DrVenkman Posted October 13, 2022 Share Posted October 13, 2022 5 minutes ago, Tillek said: Very true... but how often is it the developer? Got no clue, and that's not really the point. The point is, Jon's right - small, niche software for stuff like our hobby gets open-sourced, anywhere from 0 - a few dozen people fork the repo, tinker with it for a day or a month and most lose interest. Meanwhile, the main codebase lies fallow unless that original dev is doing the work. So yeah ... all decisions about Jon's code are his to make. The rest of us are just wasting electrons arguing for the sake of arguing, and it's all a side-topic for this thread, at best. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ivop Posted October 14, 2022 Share Posted October 14, 2022 1 hour ago, DrVenkman said: Even little old RespeQt has nearly a dozen. And no public release in 2-1/2 years. I absolutely do not doubt that bigger, more lucrative projects (*) exist that have many more forks that this. (*) Contrary to common belief, "Open Source" can make a lot of people a lot of money: dedicated paid support, hardware sales and support running said open source code, etc. That number of forks says nothing. Just on github there are over 3600 forks of gcc. Still, there is just one true gcc project. Do you remember the egcs/gcc times? Even then there were just two main forks and eventually they merged again. Similar to ffmpeg and libav. And if they don't merge (AspeQt/RespeQt, or xfree86/Xorg, or OpenOffice/LibreOffice, and lots more) one of them will be dominant and the other will be obsolete. 50 relevant forks, sorry, there's no such thing. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ivop Posted October 14, 2022 Share Posted October 14, 2022 (edited) 44 minutes ago, DrVenkman said: The rest of us are just wasting electrons arguing for the sake of arguing, I have long given up on FJC to open up his source code. Maybe he might share his TUI code though 44 minutes ago, DrVenkman said: and it's all a side-topic for this thread, at best. Agreed. Edited October 14, 2022 by ivop Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+DrVenkman Posted October 14, 2022 Share Posted October 14, 2022 30 minutes ago, ivop said: 50 relevant forks, sorry, there's no such thing. That’s not what you said, and it’s what we call in America “moving the goal posts.” One never knows contemporaneously which fork(s) will be - in your words - “relevant” and which won’t. It’s only in hindsight that one can say if a particular fork matters or not. But in any case it doesn’t matter whether it’s once or fifty times - once code is forked, it’s forked Then what? Someone has to pick up the tasks of actually doing something with it. And in the retro world, that doesn’t happen a lot if at all. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ricky Spanish Posted October 14, 2022 Share Posted October 14, 2022 40 minutes ago, ivop said: I have long given up on FJC to open up his source code. Make him a decent 5 figure offer and see what happens. 3 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ivop Posted October 14, 2022 Share Posted October 14, 2022 (edited) 13 minutes ago, DrVenkman said: That’s not what you said, and it’s what we call in America “moving the goal posts.” I know that expression, but it was implied earlier that making your code open source would result in 50 forks that were incompatible and all in use. There's no such thing. Forking on github is done a lot of time just for convenience. 13 minutes ago, DrVenkman said: One never knows contemporaneously which fork(s) will be - in your words - “relevant” and which won’t. It’s only in hindsight that one can say if a particular fork matters or not. True. But there will never be 11 relevant forks, let alone 50. See my previous real world examples. Either they merge again, or one fades away. 13 minutes ago, DrVenkman said: But in any case it doesn’t matter whether it’s once or fifty times - once code is forked, it’s forked Then what? Someone has to pick up the tasks of actually doing something with it. And in the retro world, that doesn’t happen a lot if at all. That's what you say, and what FJC thinks. I can name at least four of my own hardware projects that got picked up by others and developed further. Software, several more. And that's just Atari/Retro stuff. Edit: elaborated Edited October 14, 2022 by ivop 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+x=usr(1536) Posted October 14, 2022 Share Posted October 14, 2022 27 minutes ago, Ricky Spanish said: Make him a decent 5 6 figure offer and see what happens. FIFY - he's worth the extra zero on the end 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
HiassofT Posted October 14, 2022 Share Posted October 14, 2022 8 minutes ago, ivop said: Forking on github is done a lot of time just for convenience. Forking on Github is necessary for contributors in order to get their changes/fixes included in the main project: You fork the project, apply changes, publish them in a branch on your fork and then create a pull request against the main repository. The project maintainers then review the changes and either include (merge) them in the main project, request further changes or reject them. That's just the normal process how most open source projects work. The number of forks is more an indication of how popular a project is. It doesn't mean all forks are actually real active contributors, some just fork so they have a copy in case the original project closes and removes the repository (think about what happened with AspeQt where the maintainer completely nuked it on Sourceforge), some apply some personal changes/fixes and keep a backup on github etc. But I think we are completely off topic now... so long, Hias 6 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ricky Spanish Posted October 14, 2022 Share Posted October 14, 2022 5 minutes ago, x=usr(1536) said: FIFY - he's worth the extra zero on the end Up to @flashjazzcat to add that extra zero 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Stephen Posted October 14, 2022 Share Posted October 14, 2022 1 hour ago, ivop said: That number of forks says nothing. Just on github there are over 3600 forks of gcc. Still, there is just one true gcc project. Do you remember the egcs/gcc times? Even then there were just two main forks and eventually they merged again. Similar to ffmpeg and libav. And if they don't merge (AspeQt/RespeQt, or xfree86/Xorg, or OpenOffice/LibreOffice, and lots more) one of them will be dominant and the other will be obsolete. 50 relevant forks, sorry, there's no such thing. How much source code for commercial Atari Jaguar games has been released? Dozen at most. What has been done with it? Absolutely nothing. As a developer for my full time job, I get tired of hearing about open source all the time. Even worse in the retro scene. It's not some magical bullet that will suddenly makes 100s of projects appear. It almost never leads to anything. As this thread has many good examples of already. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mazzspeed Posted October 14, 2022 Share Posted October 14, 2022 The Ultimate series of cartridges for the C64 are open source and do very well, I'm sure Gideon is making 'enough' out of each unit sold as well as sales of the Ultimate 64 motherboards. Open source can work and does work in many, many instances - However for a community the size of the A8 community, I agree that closed source is probably better given the circumstances. I love my FJC/Candle products, hang in there guys. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
1200XL M.U.L.E. Posted October 14, 2022 Share Posted October 14, 2022 Hmmm ... open source. Ubuntu is open source and "free", right? Is it because there's a consortium guiding the development? Maybe we could make an Atari development consortium to set a standard for development and code management. Just thinking out loud. Shoot me down here. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mikey Posted October 14, 2022 Share Posted October 14, 2022 (edited) 4 hours ago, Stephen said: As a developer for my full time job, I get tired of hearing about open source all the time. Even worse in the retro scene. It's not some magical bullet that will suddenly makes 100s of projects appear. It almost never leads to anything. As this thread has many good examples of already. Same here. Couldn't agree more. Open source = open sores, most of the time. With few notable exceptions. Edited October 14, 2022 by mikey 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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