4:06 p.m.
Thanks for the useful information everyone. We are going to keep working on
getting farsight2 and telepathy-farsight working. We apologize if we
haven't been doing things the open source way. We are just a couple
students who are new to the open source world. We're still learning how to
do things. I look forward to talking to some of you further to figure out
the problems in our project.
-Taylor Rose
OVC Devel Team
On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 11:07 PM, Kevin Mark <kevin.mark(a)verizon.net> wrote:
On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 12:59:28PM +0100, Sjoerd Simons wrote:
<snip>
> Earlier this year we did some changes in both farsight and Gstreamer
which
> caused issues when combining certain versions of the two. Ofcourse if you
had
> raised the issue you were seeing with us at the time we could have helped
you
> out there...
>
> > So at this point we need help from the upstream. Without either the
> > Gstreamer bug fixed or some help using Farsight we are at an impasse.
We
> > would appreciate any help from upstream community members. Feel free
to
> > pull our repo and check out our code. If you're unfamiliar with the
XO's
> > you should know that the code requires the Sugar environment to run.
You raise good points. It is quite a change of perspetive to join a group
that
expect you to 'bother' them and pick their brain, as opposed to a community
where people do things in isolation. So I would guess that the people
leading
the course and the students are learning how to fix this process as fast as
they can but have missed some things. Hopefully you and they can critque it
and
find ways to get the TOS program even more engaged in the FLOSS way more.
It
will benefit the course and the FLOSS community.
>
> So at this point i need to go of on a bit of a rant. I did check out your
code
> and it looks like "My first video conferencing application", which is
fair
> enough really as for most if not all of you it will be your first video
> conferencing application.
>
> It is sad though that a project that afaik is partially meant to teach
how to
> do open source development seems to have completely failed at actually
using
> open source properly.
>
> The power of FOSS is partially that you can stand on the shoulders of
giants
> and that you can work together to move the state of the art forward in
> such a way that it benefits all parties. As an added benefit, in most
active
> projects there are always some people that are happy to help you with the
> initial learning curve and/or issues you're having.
>
> What i've seen from this project over the past few months is someone once
or
> twice appearing on our IRC channel, scattergunning a load of questions,
getting
> some help and then disappearing again. Which doesn't seem like a great
way of
> engaging an open source project... To make matters worse at the end of
march i
> sent an e-mail to some of your projects leads, asking how things were
going and
> if any mentoring or other help was needed, to which i've never got any
reply..
> Seems like they missed a much-needed oppurtunity there.
Again, I hope you and they can meet to discuss how they could have better
taught this point and ways they can convey to the students how to engage
projects in a way that you feel is appropriate.
>
> Judging from looking at your code and the experiences above, your project
> worked in the same way a lot of companies that don't actually understand
open
> source work. You grabbed various open source bits that were available
and that
> you could get to work without spending too much effort on them, wrote
> your program in somewhat of a vacuum, slapped a nice open source license
on it
> and said: look, look, we did open source isn't it amazing...
I dont expect the course to be static, I assume they will learn as they go
and
will do better next time with feedback like you have given. They are trying
to
get people engaged in the FLOSS community, so hopefully the students have
felt
the excitment and will work to grow our community.
>
> What you seem to have ended up with is a stepping stone that allowed you
to
> look over the fence that was directly in front of you, only to see there
is a
> big and dense jungle on the other side blocking your path. While you
could
> have been part of an expedition with many years of combined experience on
how
> to get through such a jungle...
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