wwp@yahoogroups.com:
Re: Which stitching software to choose ? ????
Stefan Peter 2009-Nov-05 19:00:00
Jeffrey Martin | 360Cities.net schrieb:
> If anyone wants to know why Hugin progresses at the speed it does, with only
> marginal success, without the "critical mass" that other, very successful,
> open-source projects have enjoyed, look no further.
I don't think that you understand the motivation of open source at all.
It is not a question of comercial success, market share or, god behave,
world domination. For most open source developers, the motivation is
somewhere else:
o I want to be able to implement my own ideas, find solutions for my
problems or itches.
o I want to learn something new, want to know how it works, ...
o I have the perfect idea for problem xxx and I want to find out if this
really works.
o I need a program that does xxx, but I don't find one that runs under
yyy. So , I have to write it myself.
o Every day in the office, I have to perform the "bend over and smile"
stanza and implement silly customer requests that clutter my design and
give me troubles further on. In this project, nobody can force me to do
what I'm not convinced of.
Of course, there are some lower grade motivations, too:
o I want to see my name in the "about" screen of a product in order to
become immortal.
o I want to be the largest fish in the pond (and here it helps if the
pond is small;)
o I hate product xxx, so I want to write a free clone that takes away
market share and money from company yyy.
Now, if there was no cheap or free panorama sticker application under
windows, I'm sure hugin could attract some developers who would struggle
to remedy this windows installer issue. As it is, however, having to
write and support such a beast for a mostly ungrateful audience that
bitches about every bump along the road is not easy. Everyone who takes
up this burden has my highest respect, although I never use the windows
version of hugin.
If you want to see a specific result in the open source world, you have
to *invest* something. This may be time, or money (to buy someone else's
time) or know-how. And even then, you have no right to demand something.
You can do it yourself, but if you don't, and you can't convince
somebody else to do it for you, you're out of luck.
If you don't accept this, keep away from open source. If you are
prepared to embrace this philosophy, you will discover gems and, from
time to time, stumble across some missing parts (like an officially
released hugin 2009.xxx installer for windows). But by then, you know
how to help yourself, hopefully ...
As this topic is really OT for this list, I'd like to invite you to
#removed# for further comments.
Oops, this has taken much longer than I anticipated. Time for me to
crawl back under my stone ...
Regards
Stefan Peter