[gst-devel] [TOS] [Telepathy] OLPC Open Video Chat Announcement

[Taylor Rose (RIT Student)]

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 at 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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> | : :' :     The Universal OS....| mysite.verizon.net/kevin.mark/.|
> | `. `'   http://www.debian.org/.| http://counter.li.org [#238656]|
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>
>
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