Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
And, if memory serves--I could be wrong, God knows--I think I said when Valloric said he was leaving that this was exactly what I thought was going to happen. Without making it a paid product--for which I was thoroughly castigated as an evil capitalist scumbag, at the time--there's inadequate support to make it worthwhile for the developer. And now...we're here. And believe me, I feel very sorry for John. This certainly wasn't what he agreed to do, be the main developer for the project, and I doubt we're going to find a boatload more volunteers to support the coding. I could--and I hope I will be proven to--be wrong.
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Tell me about it. There are not many e-book readers that see the need for Sigil. The just buy a book and read it as-is, but that's not for me. If it's not to my liking, I have to be able to fix it, somehow, and Sigil has been my go-to program. It was one of the reasons for me to get back into e-reading again (after being in- and out of it in 2007-2008).
As I said, the open-source adagio "Anyone can help, and then the software will be open, and free, and improved very fast all the time" only counts for some huge projects that serve *a lot* of people.
Smaller programs could be open source of course, in the same way as Red Hat Linux is. "There's the code. Good luck. If you want an out-of-the-box installable version, support, and great stuff like documentation, you have to buy the boxed package."
People who don't want to pay are always a bit behind the latest version (see CentOS et al in the case of Linux) with less documentation, less support, third party software not officially tested for that distribution, but they can have a Red Hat clone for free. People who want the latest and greatest and have to *rely* on it and need support and guaranteed bug fixes ASAP, they buy Red Hat itself.
If Sigil (and Calibre) worked like that, I'd probably pay for the boxed version too.
Another set of projects that I heavily rely on are the music typesetter LilyPond and it's main editor Frescobaldi. LilyPond is a bit like TeX/LaTeX for music, and Frescobaldi is comparable to Sigil, but for sheet music. Last time I looked, LilyPond had two official developrs, and Frescobaldi had one... and one contributor.