[PD] max msp vs pd

etienne deleflie et at lalila.net
Tue Nov 15 02:58:56 CET 2005


Mathieu Bouchard wrote:

>On Mon, 14 Nov 2005, Arie van Schutterhoef wrote:
>
>  
>
>>>Jitter is a clone of GridFlow.
>>>      
>>>
>>-Jitter is rumored to be 'inspired' by nato 0,55 of the (in)famous
>> NN-aglomerate.
>>    
>>
>
>According to the NN-Borgs, everything descended from NATO, so, whatever.
>
>  
>
>>-I have always been puzzled by this insistence on using java for the GUI.
>> Seems to me also being the main reason why people disbanded jMax.
>> and moved either to PD or to Max/MSP.
>>    
>>
>
>I wouldn't think so, but I agree that it was one of the several major 
>reasons.
>  
>
I think a principle reason for the demise of jMax was IRCAM"s 
mis-management of the integration with the open source community. The 
SWING problem could have easily been resolved, but that effort was not 
well supported. Then there was the binary file format discussions where 
the IRCAM team decided to go against the opinion of the majority of the 
list contributors (... as far as I remember! correct me if I am wrong.)

Important decisions that affected the work of many open-source 
developers were made behind closed doors... and suggestions from the 
open-source community were too easily rejected.

I think the lesson was that to have an "open project" you need to be 
able to partly relinquish control of the code to the community... the 
developers of IRCAM were trying very hard to achieve a "perfect" 
architecture,  which is to their credit ......  but their tight control 
alienated the open source developers ... which ultimately killed the 
project.

The whole jMAX story would make a very interesting historical analysis 
of what makes an open source project successful (or not)....

Etienne




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