And I never said you did : ) But you’re not the only participant in this thread, or even really the OP and the first to suggest these things. So if we don’t want to just repeat the previous, and all too frequent, pattern of “unrealistic expectation leads to predictably inevitable inaction”, or worse, do something dumb that paints us into an even harder to get out of corner later, then it’s important to understand and solve the problem. Not to just brainstorm ways to put some makeup on the symptoms you find most annoying.
A lot more zeroes than $60,000 to maintain it? I’ll learn whatever you want me to learn if you’re going to pay the person who implements this feature 6 million dollars over ~10 years.
This is worth requoting, because you managed to both miss the point, and in your own language perfectly re-iterate and emphasise it! \o/
Nobody is going to fund that, ergo nobody is going to maintain it.
it sounds like an attempt was made to revamp it during a GSOC, but nothing came of it.
QED.
I thought these forums were where you post feature requests.
It’s certainly the right place to brainstorm and flesh out half formed ideas. But if you want to turn them into feature implementation, you need to address the real problems behind why what you’re requesting isn’t Already Done or an existing work in progress.
Just repeating “I’d like world peace please. It would be really nice and lots of people on the internet want it.”, isn’t the way we’ll ever actually achieve that. You have to solve the Fundamental Problem and not accidentally create more even worse ones along the way.
Crowdsourcing the development is an interesting idea though
If you get value out of Kdenlive, and it saves you spending subscription fees on a lesser tool, or your own personal “from each according to their ability” puts you in a position to be able to make regular equitable contributions to our fundraising efforts, then please by all means do.
The volunteers who bring it, and all the bells and whistles that go along with it, to you, aren’t just volunteering their time, there’s also real out of pocket expenses they volunteer behind the scenes too. And Bernd, in his usual self-deprecating and somewhat selfless way, sells himself far short about how much he and others genuinely contribute to making this project what it is today.
It would be cool if …
I don’t know how new you are to this, and how much you’re still catching up on, but again you’re reiterating things that we are already doing. We’ve been doing reports from the sprints and running the public Cafe meetings for a long time now.
There are no magic bullets when it comes to attracting valuable contributors and contributions to Free software projects. But there are bullets that kill them, and wrongly directed windfall funding is a well documented leading cause of death.
The best Free software projects achieve what they do because there is no number of dollars that can be used to substitute an engaged and passionate and knowledgeable developer with any number of mercenaries who are only there for the money and/or the box it checks on the resume they want to use to get money from someone else.
So finding ways to maximise the amount of time that those people can spend on doing the thing that they love and that we all love them for is always going to be a massive win. Finding ways to hire more people who aren’t that brand of engaged with the problems and have a burning itch to solve them well, much much less so. Those are the kind of people who created the sort of problem software that you started using Kdenlive to get away from in the first place… Why would we want them here doing the same damage to this one?
That’s why running a one-off crowdsourcing campaign to fund a single half-formed idea, or why trying to replicate the work of other Free software contributors who love every aspect of their pet problem more than we will ever have time to let ourselves care about it is a Terrible Mistake, in the “road to hell is paved with” genre.
If the long term goal is for kdenlive to be, and remain, the actual leading leader in best at being better, then we need to cultivate the things and the people which are actually the best at each job we want it to be able to do.
Just finding someone prepared to slap something on for the amount of money we can afford to give them to stick around just long enough to have someone sign off on the cheque only creates more future technical debt that someone passionate is going to have to volunteer time to fix later. GSOC is great at getting volunteer projects to spend their time interviewing and auditioning and pre-filtering the next generation of google employees at a less than minimum wage pay rate. Its record for producing Valuable Contributions and valuable long term contributors for those projects, not so much …
It’s not that we don’t want what you want. It’s just that we are already up to our necks in understanding why we don’t already have it and the many many other things that for whatever reason are still more fundamentally urgent to address first.
It’s not that we haven’t thought of some shortcut you think you might be able to suggest. There are no shortcuts in engineering. There is a long history of “there’s never time to do it right, but there’s always time to do it again” - and the real success story of Free software is its openness to welcoming and facilitating and collaborating with those rare people who have the time and the knowledge to Do some part of some problem Right.
We’re extremely late to the “doing text well” party. If we’re going to spend effort on improving this, it would be madness to not first try and find someone compatible with us who is already doing it well, to work with on improving this for all of our collective benefits.
Just because your needs (today!) are modest does not mean there isn’t someone else right behind you waiting to say “but Other Application can do Cool Thing. Why can’t you do that too? Lots of people on the internet want it.” or that their need is any less valid or important than yours. That person might even be you after you outgrow your current modest needs. If we don’t plan for that happening and how to address it, then we haven’t solved a problem, we’ve just swapped new for old with no warranty of the New being in any way of equal or better or more repairable substance than the old.
This isn’t “write our own implementation of how to left pad a string” - doing “movie text” well is a very large, very complicated, and very actively ongoing problem. It’s not a novice project that someone can whip up a best of breed equivalent to in a few short weeks without actually using some existing project that already does that.
If we don’t address that, we’re never really going to be “Good” at this, let alone Better than everyone else.
