Quote:
Originally Posted by EowynCarter
Well, I'm not that much worried.
Sigil have reached a point where it's pretty mature. It have almost anything needed.
It's open source, so, as long as there are people willing to work on it, there not much preventing it.
Why insist on selling sigil ? I like it the FOSS way ! And IMHO, closing the source would be the fastest way to kill sigil.
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I think you misunderstand, Eowyn. No one is "insisting" on selling Sigil. Those of us who've been around OS long enough know that you need fairly massive user communities to keep OS going when its initiator/designer leaves, and we're worried that with Valloric leaving, that driving force will not be present. It's all well and good to say that it's nearly perfect now, but epub standards are evolving incredibly rapidly, as are the devices upon which they are read--just take a look at html5 and epub3. It's not Chicken-Little-ing to be concerned that Valloric's departure could be the death of Sigil as we know it. It might be a slow and lingering death; but death nonetheless.
"Everyone" likes software FOSS. That's great when you have someone like Valloric who is willing to be the unpaid slave Maintainer (for his doctorate). It works far less well when one has
an exceedingly small user community and no willing unpaid (or nominally-paid) Maintainer indentured servant. Kovid does well off his donations because he has thousands of users, because any doofus can use Calibre and "make" an ebook. Not so with Sigil. I don't think it's an unreasonable concern that Sigil could struggle post-Valloric.
JMHO, of course...but I remember all too well great FOSS projects, like evo-Articles, that was before its time, never developed a huge user community and died. Or Feng Office; a similar situation. Or, or or....there are thousands of projects just like this one that had larger user communities than Sigil that just didn't make it when the innovater left.
Hell, let's look at it this way: we know how many contributions have been made to Calibre by persons who aren't Kovid--precisely how many Sigil contributions have there been by THIS community?
How many FOSS contributors that have already added value and usefulness to Sigil? Stand up and be counted, folks; everyone who made a contribution,
in code, to Sigil. Show of hands?
Hitch