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The future of UNIAUD & WarpVision, netlabs.org blog
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obiwan
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41. Re:The future of UNIAUD & WarpVision, netlabs.org blog
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I am persuaded by Kim. Money from users is increasingly scarce, and isn't sufficient to effect the desired goals here. Where it can be had, hardware and bandwidth for such sites as os2world, netlabs, and the other gems would seem to be the most efficient use of it.

It seems to me the best thing is to facilitate source access and the ability to build these packages, along with online content such as support forums and bugtracking. If we can build and patch it, and document and discuss it, development will continue. As Sebadoh suggested, if the core of UNIAUD were more compatible with ALSA, development would mostly be a matter of maintaining that compatibility, much less work than the project currently has entailed. If there is a problem with a specific card, and enough people want it, a bounty would seem a decent incentive.

If there were other goals of UNIAUD than compatibility with ALSA, they should probably be split into a separate project, so users and developers interested in those features can pursue each for its own sake.

Someone must be responsible for maintaining the code, but he doesn't have to be paid. If benevolent enough, he might even handle voluntary donations in a constructive way. Someone probably already is.

Still, chartering some sort of plan is needed, and I haven't really done that here.

Date: 26 Feb, 2007 on 00:25
ECSUser
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42. Re:The future of UNIAUD & WarpVision, netlabs.org blog
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cytan (25 Feb, 2007 18:39):
I think it's time for another poll! Will I pay $20 for a subscription for WarpVision development if there are clearly defined milestones? And another one for UNIAUD. If the number is less than 100, I think we can forget about it.

cytan


Kim (25 Feb, 2007 11:17):
Question here, but do you really think that people are willing to be part of yet another subscriptions program?

....
Finally I'm totally positive to the suggestion, just that I know from other community efforts it's hard to get people to cash up the money for something they think should be free and cost nothing.



I would pay $20 or $25 for a Warpvision subscription as well as a Uniaud subscription . I think we can use this model in the short term to fully document these projects, setup robust build environments where necessary, streamline the process of importing code used or borrowed from other projects and fix some bugs. UniAud in particular is an important piece of eCS and I think here more so than WarpVision (Which seems to be picking up some competitors ), A subscription from users AND from the businesses who currently have an interest in eCS would only help eCS to progress to version v2.0 and v3.0.

Date: 26 Feb, 2007 on 05:39
Stuart
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43. Re:The future of UNIAUD & WarpVision, netlabs.org blog
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last updated at 26 Feb, 2007 13:38 (1 times)
Well, I don't know if I have any solutions here, but I'm certainly feeling depressed about it all. I think that development on Uniaud/ALSA will gain most ground if they are tightly focussed on a small set of hardware, e.g. Soundblaster cards and the sound chips in Thinkpad T* laptops.

I would certainly pay up to $200 for a working DVD player that uses the menus and plays all my DVDs. I have to keep a windows partition for that, and it rankles.

I just wish I could get my head around programming!

Stuart

Date: 26 Feb, 2007 on 11:01
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44. Re:The future of UNIAUD & WarpVision, netlabs.org blog
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What I fear is that we don't settle on a funding model, these two projects will just die, like ODIN. Unlike LINUX, programmer altruism is not realistic for us because our developer base is so small. There are many of us (myself included) who are just not into programming and just want to use the OS. The only way to get programmes that we want is to pay for them and if the community does not want to pony up $$$$ to continue development, OS/2 or ECS will die a natural death from sheer apathy.

cytan

Date: 26 Feb, 2007 on 17:11
Warp5
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45. Re:The future of UNIAUD & WarpVision, netlabs.org blog
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obiwan (24 Feb, 2007 02:43):
Development, after all, must be done by developers. Funding is only for the purpose of furthering development, and not the end in itself. My concern is designing a payment/voting system too complicated and rigid to promote and invite open development. This project is sufficiently different from OO.org that a copy of its model isn't necessarily a good fit.

Remember that the solution isn't just to substitute for Adrian's money but to also free it from the constraints of the single-paid-developer-only model.



I took the weekend off and now I am back and I am confronted with lots of posts, great! (I find it really hard to follow this thread here, I wish there was a way to make this display in a threaded view, otherwise I would really prefer to move this over to the netlabs.org community mailing list that I can view threaded via the newsgroup interface)

Obiwan, I copied your two very valid points to the wiki, to keep them in mind.

Robert

Date: 27 Feb, 2007 on 08:24
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46. Re:The future of UNIAUD & WarpVision, netlabs.org blog
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Kim (25 Feb, 2007 11:17):
Question here, but do you really think that people are willing to be part of yet another subscriptions program? Just look at the subscription program for eCS I don't think that has been a success (and please someone correct me and show some digits here on how many that subscribes to eCS upgrades). As well, the old IBM subscription program wasn't a hit either among private users.

If a new subscription program should be set up I would suggest that there should be defined a minimum amount of users and if this can't be fulfilled; Plan B should be used instead.

Also, look at existing subscriptions plans and donation programs such as:

- eCS upgrade subscriptions
- Netlabs direct donations
- OS2 World bounty system

How much funds has been collected and how many people are subscribers already? How big is the markedplace? If people don't even care to cast their vote on a poll asking for future development and the same poll gets around 300-400 votes.

Also, what do you get for money, early betas and source code. I think that most users couldn't care less.

Finally I'm totally positive to the suggestion, just that I know from other community efforts it's hard to get people to cash up the money for something they think should be free and cost nothing.



I totally agree with your points and also the thoughts of the other people in this thread are appreciated! I guess we would have to come up with at least 2 funding ideas and then have people vote on them. I could even live with saying that if not at least 500 people vote, then the project makes no sense as not enough people are interested, but I guess the final number would have to be discussed.

Robert

Date: 27 Feb, 2007 on 08:38
obiwan
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47. Re:The future of UNIAUD & WarpVision, netlabs.org blog
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last updated at 28 Feb, 2007 02:15 (1 times)
Thanks Warp5.

From what I understand Odin is a good example of a project that was so unfortunately difficult to build that it discouraged open development and contribution. I can't prove it but I would suspect that was a bigger factor than money in its decline.

Market research such as the poll discussed would be a good thing to help flesh this out.

Just thinking in general economic terms, if people are willing to pay for a sound driver subscription, that would indicate to me that the cost of an eComStation license is too low. There is the conventional expectation that the cost of an OS includes the cost of driver development. It would seem fair to me that if anyone should profit by OS/2 driver development it should be SSI, as the eComStation product is tied directly to it. In fact, the sales of eComStation should be expected to be directly impacted by the reliability of UNIAUD. This also means that the party with the most interest in developing UNIAUD as a marketable product is SSI.

Conversely, if UNIAUD itself demands a paid subscription, that will depress the viable sale price of eComStation, because it is an added cost to the consumer. It could even kill sales of eComStation, because the very fact that sound drivers are sold separately (even referred to a third party for support?) makes an OS less attractive for sale.

Therefore, IMHO, the ordinary paid developer of UNIAUD should be SSI, and how much of their resources go into its development is best decided by SSI, in the context of developing eComStation for market.

If the reality is that SSI cannot afford the resources to develop UNIAUD sufficiently and also profitably, then UNIAUD can't be sustained on its own either, as a purely marketed and sold product. So paying for our software, on this scale, does not guarantee its survival.

On the other hand, that does not mean UNIAUD can't be sustained with SSI's limited resources. Its being GPL means if someone has the need and ability, he can fix a problem with it. The only "altruism" needed in this scenario is that people submit their fixes for inclusion. If I can't fix it, I can ask questions and someone might be able to help. If I don't have time, I could pay someone to fix it - anyone, or one of the "official" (but perhaps ordinarily unpaid). If I can't afford it, I could find others who also want the problem fixed and we can pool our funds in a bounty.

That is why I believe the online communication tools are so key. SSI as the vendor of eComStation has a central role, and the community has a complementary one.

We form a symbiont circle. What happens to one will affect the other. You must understand this.

Date: 28 Feb, 2007 on 02:11
Warp5
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48. Re:The future of UNIAUD & WarpVision, netlabs.org blog
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obiwan (28 Feb, 2007 02:15):
Thanks Warp5.

From what I understand Odin is a good example of a project that was so unfortunately difficult to build that it discouraged open development and contribution. I can't prove it but I would suspect that was a bigger factor than money in its decline.



I agree to some extend. Even though I think ODIN is a bad example as that is a rather complex project. The number of the developers that would really understand the code and not just "patch stuff" is rather small. But I fully agree that build instructions and tools have to be readily available!



Market research such as the poll discussed would be a good thing to help flesh this out.

Yes, my current idea is to draft out two funding proposals and then do a poll about which one to use. However, I expect a high rate of people that will participate in the poll and then later will not contribute, but that's life.



Just thinking in general economic terms, if people are willing to pay for a sound driver subscription, that would indicate to me that the cost of an eComStation license is too low. There is the conventional expectation that the cost of an OS includes the cost of driver development. It would seem fair to me that if anyone should profit by OS/2 driver development it should be SSI, as the eComStation product is tied directly to it. In fact, the sales of eComStation should be expected to be directly impacted by the reliability of UNIAUD. This also means that the party with the most interest in developing UNIAUD as a marketable product is SSI.

I talked with a developer yesterday, and he stressed the point that it is important to get feedback and only develop (and support) stuff that people really need. So he was in favor of simply documenting the current environment and then release a test version against which bugs could be verified and new chipsets or new features could be requested. So maybe we should move away from the subscription idea a bit, at least for UniAudio...


Conversely, if UNIAUD itself demands a paid subscription, that will depress the viable sale price of eComStation, because it is an added cost to the consumer. It could even kill sales of eComStation, because the very fact that sound drivers are sold separately (even referred to a third party for support?) makes an OS less attractive for sale.

Therefore, IMHO, the ordinary paid developer of UNIAUD should be SSI, and how much of their resources go into its development is best decided by SSI, in the context of developing eComStation for market.

If the reality is that SSI cannot afford the resources to develop UNIAUD sufficiently and also profitably, then UNIAUD can't be sustained on its own either, as a purely marketed and sold product. So paying for our software, on this scale, does not guarantee its survival.

On the other hand, that does not mean UNIAUD can't be sustained with SSI's limited resources. Its being GPL means if someone has the need and ability, he can fix a problem with it. The only "altruism" needed in this scenario is that people submit their fixes for inclusion. If I can't fix it, I can ask questions and someone might be able to help. If I don't have time, I could pay someone to fix it - anyone, or one of the "official" (but perhaps ordinarily unpaid). If I can't afford it, I could find others who also want the problem fixed and we can pool our funds in a bounty.

That is why I believe the online communication tools are so key. SSI as the vendor of eComStation has a central role, and the community has a complementary one.



I will try to contact SSI and see if I can get some input on the whole thing.

Robert

Date: 28 Feb, 2007 on 10:28
obiwan
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49. Re:The future of UNIAUD & WarpVision, netlabs.org blog
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last updated at 01 Mar, 2007 02:05 (1 times)

Warp5 (28 Feb, 2007 10:28 ):
I think ODIN is a bad example as that is a rather complex project. The number of the developers that would really understand the code and not just "patch stuff" is rather small.

I'll concede that point. You would know better, and that makes sense to me. Maybe there is a lesson to be learned there as well.

Date: 01 Mar, 2007 on 02:04
Kim
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50. Re:The future of UNIAUD & WarpVision, netlabs.org blog
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A little followup regarding the raise of funds; might be that quite a few have issues to pay 20-50 USD in one single payment. So suggestion that I could set up within the OS2 World bounty system together with Björn Söderström (he is the one who's in charge of the Bounty System) would be to set up a subscription to support generic OS2 development where people can sign up and by that we can have paypal to withdraw sums from 1-5 dollars per month. As earlier OS2 User Group Sweden will take care of all the fees involved so 100% sponsored funds goes to development.

If this is a supported idea by you guys here, I'm more than open to set this up and as well a input of how the subscription information should look like would be welcome.

Within this thread there has also been talk about setting up polls; make suggestion by using following url:

http://scripts.os2world.com/stuffed/index.cgi?pkg=poll&action=suggest_poll

---
--
Kim Haverblad
OS2World.Com
Malmoe, Sweden

Date: 02 Mar, 2007 on 14:50
The future of UNIAUD & WarpVision, netlabs.org blog
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