Re: Performance issues on Windows, suggests a MSVC build

[John W. Eaton]

On 22-Jun-2011, fork wrote:

| (1) I bet there is a "conversion rate" at which a user becomes a
| contributor for open source software.  My guess is 1/1000 per year
| (probably an over-hopeful number really),
| whatsoever.  If I am right, this is why it is important to get a lot
| of windows users to just use first, so that the 1/1000 who can
| actually develop will start pitching in.  Otherwise, this 1/1000
| will never hear of you at all.

So we (who are not very interested or knowledgeable about Windows)
have to develop and distribute a simple to install Windows binary so
that we can get contributors to help us with Windows?  Don't we
already have that with the 3.2.4 release that is on source forge?
That's been downloaded more than 300,000 times since March 2010.  So
shouldn't we have something like 300 Windows developers by now?

I remain unconvinced that there are many people out there who are
competent Windows programmers who are also interested in developing
free numerical software.  My guess would be that most everyone who is
interested in developing free software as a volunteer has abandoned
Windows.  I'm OK with being wrong about this, but we already have a
Windows binary that should be sufficient to get competent programmers
started and it has been downloaded a fairly large number of times, yet
I'm still waiting to see the Windows programmers contributing.

jwe