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Nicolas George wrote:
| But for such a snowball effect to happen, the development needs to
be open.
| Which means at least:
|
| - a public developers mailing-list; that list must be where the actual
|   development takes place, or at least a significant part of it;
|
| - access to the current state of the source code; the best way to
achieve
|   that is to offer read-only anonymous access to a version control
system.
|
| I can pretty well guarantee that, as long as POV-Ray does not have
these two
| items, it will never have an active community of contributors.
|
	Actually, it used to have a reasonably active community of
contributors (just before 3.5 was released). They didn't contribute
directly to the core, but instead they contributed to MegaPov. That
worked because (here we find your two points):
~ - Most discussion took place openly on the newsgroups here;
~ - Nathan Kopp (who maintained MegaPov at the time) released new
versions very frequently (including the source).

	When 3.5 came out, all this activity petered out. Among the
possible reasons are:
~ - Nathan got included in the core team and had less time to keep
releasing MegaPov on the same rythm;
~ - The 3.5 code was quite different from the 3.1 code (on which
MegaPov and all community development were based and which was
pretty old at the time). When 3.5 came out, it required a
significant investment to port the patches to the new code base and
most contributors didn't want to spend that time re-doing something
they had already done just to have to do it again when the next
version came out (which is one reason why I never ported my
contributions to the new code base and simply moved to other projects).

	Moreover, one of the reason why there was that much community
development at the time despite POV's closed development model may
be that there were no other open source renderers available then.
Now, potential contributors come to POV, see that there is no recent
source code activity and simply move to other more visibly active
projects (unless they try to come here first and get put off by the
oh-so-tactful official response they get).

		Jerome
- --
+------------------------- Jerome M. BERGER ---------------------+
|    mailto:jeb### [at] freefr      | ICQ:    238062172            |
|    http://jeberger.free.fr/     | Jabber: jeb### [at] jabberfr   |
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