[kde-linux] Revive Quanta+?

[Duncan]

john Culleton posted on Wed, 28 Dec 2011 15:45:55 -0500 as excerpted:

> I will take that suggestion. But does nobody in the KDE development
> world worry about the issues that I and others have raised?

For non-core apps like a web-page editor especially, I'd say no, not 
really.  KDE, like much of FLOSS, is very much a "volunteer and scratch 
your own itch" kind of thing.

If nobody with the necessary skills (or money to pay someone with the 
skills to have it too) has that particular itch... Then yeah, it'd be 
nice, but so would be a cure for cancer or an end to world hunger.

IOW, like many charities, people donate either time or money to what 
they're interested in, and if nobody's particularly interested in that 
particular thing, well, it might have been a great project at one point, 
but it'll slowly die without sufficient interest.

But as I said earlier, don't lose hope.  The app that I'm typing this in, 
pan (a gtk-based news client but I do the lists as newsgroups thru 
gmane.org's list2news service), was basically dead for a number of years, 
its primary dev for many years having tried and failed to find someone 
interested in taking over when he lost interest.  But I've been a long-
time regular on the pan lists (which I also read using pan via gmane), 
and because of my effort and those of a few others helping to keep at 
least the lists alive (unfortunately I'm not a coder), first there came 
someone who primarily accumulated all the fixes from the various distros 
into his own git-clone of the master repo, then with his interest, a few 
others started submitting patches and people were building from his repo 
and reporting bugs, then a translator with gnome commit privs but no real 
developer skills came along and started merging patches from the newly 
active branch back into official mainline and has done a couple releases 
since, then all the new activity attracted another dev who had the skills 
time and motivation to actually develop new features... that had been on 
the list for YEARS even before the old dev lost interest...

And now we have a thriving and active pan development project with more 
folks involved than at any time since I first started following its lists 
nearly a decade ago!

All because a few of us kept the lights on at the old list and thus 
provided a core around which the new interest and set of developers could 
form! =:^)

And of course, that's the beauty of free/libre and open source software, 
too, that it was even possible.  Had pan been a proprietary product, it 
would have simply died when the original dev lost interest, since nobody 
could have cloned the git repo and restarted development.

So it does happen!

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman