On Sun, 7 May 2006, geiger wrote:

Whose abandon you are talking about? There wasn't just IRCAM involved with jMax.

I don't think it's fair to pick either technical reasons or social reasons as being decisive. It's not an either-or, it's an interaction of both kinds of reasons.

Why wasn't it possible for jMax to get community support? Why were jMax users looking into Pd? It's at once because Pd already had a bigger community, but also because jMax wasn't technically superior enough, and also because it had some serious technical drawbacks that made its users look for something else. The announcement of jMax 4.x was the final demise because instead of making technical changes that would help its community grow, it made technical changes that made its community run away. jMax 4.x makes the most sense if you see it already as the MAX plugin it was going to be morphed into, but at the same time, the PyMax project was trying to replace JAVA by Python, which would have made jMax more acceptable by free-software developers, who are the part of the community that could have helped IRCAM make jMax something more technically acceptable.

My point is that technical and social reasons are interlocked.

It would've been a worse decision to compete against C74-MAX directly, because it had a bigger user base than Pd (and still has), and was harder to technically catch up with than Pd, and also is backed with a bigger company than a team of 2-4 people at IRCAM.

There is obviously money behind the development of Pd. Intel has funded both Pd and GEM.

http://crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/bio.htm http://puredata.org/Members/zmoelnig/GemFAQ/WhatIsGEM/src

Apart from that, there are a number of Pd developers who are using university resources to develop Pd, without being hired specifically for that.

The development model is different, it's more decentralized, but that doesn't mean that there is no money involved.

They aren't quite competitive as of now, though that could change any month. There needs some kind of trigger to get things going. Currently there aren't enough developers willing to work on the core.

It's only a terrible loss of energy if you think that this energy could be going anywhere else and if you think that Pd is perfect as it is.

Whose ideas should we focus our efforts on?

That is an example of a social reason. The "complaining" also happens to be a call for discussion, for alternatives and a way to find like-minded people, some of whom can become allies. If your changes to pd are small then it's easier to code them alone. If you'd rather change pd by yourself then you don't need to look for allies. If you don't need to look for allies for your changes to pd then you don't need to understand why and how someone would.

I pretty damn know that and still trying to figure how to do it without discouraging myself again *and* without going bankrupt. I'm looking support from people who care. It also means getting a lot of non-support from people who non-care. That's a fact of life.

Compared to the jMax team, yes...

Compared to the MAX/MSP team, very much... ;-)

However, many other open-source projects are intensely more collaborative than Pd, in such a way that (the core of) Pd, jMax and MAX/MSP look about as collaborative as each other.

I haven't found his explanations to be always particularly explaining, and I don't expect them to always be, but there are some biggies for which his explanations were even more disconcerting than the lack thereof.

I don't mean just the patch submission system, I also mean discussions that lead potential patch submitters to decide whether submitting patches is worth doing.