Lightworks

[Tim Wilson]

[Jeremy Garchow] “[Herb Sevush] “But no ADK. so go ahead and develop something if you want, but don’t expect us to help or encourage you.”

You should welcome your new open source overlords…”

I went on at considerable length at the time that Open Source is a great model for some environments, and a terrible one for others. For this one: terrible.

Even the things open source was supposed to be best for, like web browsers, reveal the entropy at its heart: optimizing code and supporting developers isn’t fun. It’s WORK, and with no money to subsidize, and no managers forcing the point — do this OR ELSE — guess what? It doesn’t get done. The inevitable state of open source software is reduced speed and stability through bloat.

Not that you can’t have fun before the entropy kicks in. You can!

And of course, one way to forestall entropy is to aim low in the first place. There’s certainly an extent to which there’s no way to aim lower than feature film editing. LOL

Entropy is true for commercial software too, of course, but in those environments, there’s incentive to periodically blow up the code base and start over. That’s really the only way to do it, and there’s no practical way to do that in open source.

Just for grins, I checked our browser stats. For YEARS, Firefox was #1 here, long before it was #1 on the web as a whole. Safari actually roared into a close second in less than a year, and is now 30% ahead of FF…but Chrome is now comfortably bigger than the 2 combined. (That’s true on both Mac and Win, btw.) Safari and Chrome kept getting faster and more robust because there were bosses cracking whips to get unglamorous tasks done on schedule.

I also said at the time, and I’ll say again here, that I have no idea how this will play out with Lightworks as the source code is turned into the wild. Maybe ES will continue to actively develop and make those subsequent changes open too. I’m just talking about the state of open source IN GENERAL: open source users have only open source users to depend on….

…although it happens that we here at Creative COW are quite fond of this particular model of support. LOL