A few months ago a professor from the math department of FU Berlin filed a few bugs to poppler and Okular about video playing not being totally implemented/bug free.
After a few mail exchanges it became clear that given the always scarce resources in free software projects his bugs would not be fixed/implemented in a timely way since the poppler/Okular priorities and his' did not align.
Then the unexpected occurred, instead of complaining or giving up, he said "Well, i have a little money around" and I promptly suggested a few third party companies/individuals that would be interested in doing paid development and voilà! some time after, those features were developed
One of the often overlooked features of Free Software is the non existent vendor lock-in, in the non-free software world, if the company creating the software you use thinks your feature is nice to have but not important enough to develop, you are out of luck, it'll never happen, in the Free Software world you can have someone else develop it for you and get it merged upstream relatively easily.
I like the story. And I'd like better video support in poppler. You guys rock. And the paid guys, too.
ReplyDelete"in the Free Software world you can have someone else develop it for you and get it merged upstream relatively easyly"
ReplyDeleteNo. No one can assure you your changes will be merged. Imagine you do the work and the project leader chooses not to merge. Or, even worse, you tell the leader you want to do the job, he tells you he will merge it, and then he doesn't like the patch and doesn't merge it either.
This is a very dangerous field.
Imagine you do the work and the project leader chooses not to merge.
ReplyDeleteYou are still in much better position that in the non free software world, you got your feature done ;-)
then he doesn't like the patch
Well, then the patch is reworked, of course the contract you have with the third party should account for this if integration in upstream is your main goal
The third party companies/individuals you suggested can make patches for other kde components or only for okular/poppler? thanks
ReplyDeleteThe third party companies/individuals you suggested can make patches for other kde components or only for okular/poppler?
ReplyDeleteThey are KDE coders so they probably can tackle [almost] any KDE code you want to get improved. Send me an email to aacid@kde.org if you are interested in getting the list so you can hire them
Hi,
ReplyDeleteCould you provide a link to the bug report?
@kokoko3k I don't have the links at hand, you can have a look at poppler and okular commits regarding video playing and it'll give you some info
ReplyDelete