Re: [Gnash] Re: 0.8.1 new functionality

[Martin Guy]

2007/8/19, Dâniel Fraga <address@hidden>:

> Ok, you'll say that developers do it by
> themselves, in their spare time, without been paid for it...

No they won't, because most Gnash developers are paid hansomely by Bob
Young (former CEO RedHat)'s "lulu" publication company, partly for
beneficience, partly for the OLPC and partly because they want to use
it to do a youtube kind of thing.

There are noises about using it in the OLPC, but it is huge and slow
and the code is mostly written by self-taught twenty-year-olds and is
of appalling quality. One of the salaries people's aims, obviously, is
to make the project last as long as possible, which explains why it is
so baroque and over-engineered, and why it uses the most difficult and
complicated language and libraries as a barrier to entry.

I too was paid until Rob Savoye,the project's paid front-man and
stand-up clown, had a sudden ranting fit when he got back from holiday
in mid July, and sacked me with no notice (literally, he told me to
"f*** off").
If you're interested I'll post the 3-message exchange in its entirety,
*apparently* about making agg the default renderer, but actually a
vicious dominance thing I think. He was fresh back from holiday,
wading through mail, and my work on eliminating unreproducable bugs
from the tracker generated a lot of auto-mail for him. So he lashed
out at whoever was easiest to lash out at, i.e. the one who was
trusting enough to work without a contract with Lulu.
Or maybe he was killing one off to frighten the others?
He hadn't spoken to me since video support was included in swfdec and
I compared their technical features and posted a technical comparison
of the two. He snapped "go and work on swfdec then".
I am now waiting to see whether July's final (half) month's invoice
will be paid or not.

It's funny that AGG is now to be the default renderer

>         In the end, I think the user is a victim, Adobe is the "evil"
> and Gnash developers are heroes. But it shouldn't be this way.

Heroes. Yeah. Listen how they treat users.
These are not heroes, they are mostly self-taught twenty-something
year olds, drunk on their own cleverness and on the "prestige" of
being named in a GNU project. Like most 20-year-olds, they don;t write
code for others to read, just to try and get it working.
But don't worry about some of them being openly rude to users. The
in-group atmosphere is even worse: competitive, sneering,
bad-tempered, unable to handle technical issues without them becoming
ego soap boxes to be defended to the death. I'm glad to be away from
it, however abrupt and offensive the end was.

However, if you find it to be the best of the free players and want
and are able to contribute, of course that is the way to go.

    M