[PD] software license for pd general patch?

Mathieu Bouchard matju at artengine.ca
Mon Jul 5 16:40:52 CEST 2010


On Mon, 5 Jul 2010, João Pais wrote:

>>> I'm not excluding anyone, or criticising "the community" (not a good 
>>> term, but I brought it up). If I would be critisicing anyone, it would 
>>> be me, for not having the same interests as the majority.
>> Do you understand that NO-ONE here has the same interests as the majority
>> of those who are here ?
> not exactly the same,

Whatever is "here". Let's say that it's not pd-list, but instead, the 
whole of pd production that gets published as free software. You'd reach 
the same conclusions very quickly.

> when you put out a new version of gridflow, there are several replies 
> from people that try it out, etc etc.

That's not much of a sign. There were times in which I was receiving more 
mail than that, while GridFlow was relatively unusable (in comparison to 
today). More generally, I made some stats on pd-list activity and then I 
thought about what facts make those figures not interesting, because I 
don't want to count the posts, I want to measure activity and such. I 
didn't go much farther, but I did think about the countless posts about 
how to compile Pd, especially as for a loooooong time it wasn't even 
possible to compile Pd without editing the Makefile, because of "-Werror". 
You can bet that there are situations in which you can increase the mail 
flow by having no consideration for the users whatsoever. ;)

If you read the archives and look for all the places that say "just remove 
Werror" or "get rid of Werror" or pretty much any sentence with "Werror" 
in it, you'll see what I mean. It's all over 2003 and 2004.

Generally speaking, pd-extended made a huge difference in the history 
of pd-list, that caused a large reduction of "can't compile" posts, and 
this decreased the apparent activity of pd-list, because message-count as 
a measure of community activity is about as meaningful as counting how 
many lines of source code. (well, perhaps a bit more on average, but there 
are simple ways to make it lie.)

> When I put my abstractions out, I get no reply at all. I guess it's safe 
> to say that there is more interest in the pd list for gridflow than for 
> some small abstractions, right?

Hey, I thought that they were big abstractions, aren't they ?

Well, despite its potential far-reaching consequences as a tool for 
designing pd patches about anything, gridflow is still almost only seen as 
a video tool you only start to look at when you get tired of trying to do 
something with GEM's [pix]. That somewhat limits the potential of it. Is 
there something in your abstractions' concept, and the way you write about 
them, that limits their potential because most of its potential users 
don't recognise the contents of your summary of what it's for ? I don't 
have an idea what a click-track is, but I bet I could find a use for it 
anyway.

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| Mathieu Bouchard, Montréal, Québec. téléphone: +1.514.383.3801


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