[PD] puredata evolution

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

That's an interesting talk, they point out a number of key issues  
that have affected us as a community.  I think the idea of "poisonous  
people" is a useful one, but I would take the focus away from  
"people" and talk more about "poisonous activities".  While there are  
definitely some people who have been more poisonous than others, I  
think that probably every single Pd developer at some point has been  
poisonous.  I know I have and I have been thinking a fair amount  
about how to stop myself from doing that.  I guess the easiest thing  
I have been trying to do is to spend less time arguing in email and  
more time coding.

Another point they talk about is having a focus.  I think Pd suffers  
from the lack of focus.  As a software project, it has an unusual  
structure, which makes it difficult to clearly outline the focus.   
That's something I am planning on working on in the coming months,  
trying to figure out my own focus in all this.  Pd is quite a bit  
different here also since it covers a very wide range of topics, so  
there isn't really the possibility of a strong focus like with  
subversion.

Hopefully we can discuss this more at the Pd Convention.  It's always  
many times more productive to speak face-to-face.  Plus I think it's  
many times more fun than sitting alone behind the laptop...

.hc

On May 25, 2007, at 6:37 PM, marius schebella wrote:

> victor wrote:
>> summarizing: Which is the next future of PureData
>
> Before I try to answer that question, please keep in mind that you
> cannot compare an open source software project to any company driven
> proprietary software. Lots of people have been working very hard to
> bring Pd to the current state and propably 99 times more people use it
> in their work, and I saw some great artwork done with it. Seriously, I
> don't know so many other "art software" packages of that size. (I am
> thinking of maybe blender, processing, gimp, audacity...)
>
> But let's talk about the future. Btw there is a nice talk about open
> source software projects, which was given at "google talks".
> http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4216011961522818645
>
> To me it seems there is not really a clear direction of what Pd should
> be. Speaking as a user I only can speculate, but most probably none of
> the people who have contributed Pd code have ever agreed on a certain
> featurelist of a final version. Or whether there should be a v 1.0  
> at all.
>
> But that does not mean that there is no progress. Regarding the social
> aspect there will be the second puredata conference in late August in
> Montreal. People are doing lot of work to get this running. Then there
> are the summer of code projects http://puredata.org/dev/summer-of- 
> code.
> Other people are working on documentation and tutorials and others try
> to integrate all the different libraries into one release.
>
> btw. it is too late for this year's prix ars electronica, but since
> there is a category "digital community" Pd definitely should go for  
> that
> next year...
>
> marius.
>
> _______________________________________________
> PD-list at iem.at mailing list
> UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/ 
> listinfo/pd-list




------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
----

You can't steal a gift. Bird gave the world his music, and if you can  
hear it, you can have it. - Dizzy Gillespie