[Powderhound]

Hi,

I just joined the forum, and am learning about XBMC. Team-XBMC has done a fantastic job of organizing this project! Really!

I tried for over a year to get LinuxMCE working and be stable. The problem is that the project is just too big. But, worst of all, there is no clear vision, the documentation is awful, the roadmap is foggy (to be polite - missing more like it), feature requests are flamed if the 5 key developers don't want it, anyone who is not a senior developer is actively discouraged by them, and I could go on....

I've only just started digging around on the XBMC web site, forum, and Tracker, but already I can see that there is an inclusive spirit and excellent communication about where the project is going.

A real breath of fresh air! Well done everyone. It's great to see a project where its management is taken seriously. I'm looking forward to using and contributing to XBMC.

[jmarshall]

Hi there, and welcome!

The problem is that the project is just too big. But, worst of all, there is no clear vision, the documentation is awful, the roadmap is foggy (to be polite - missing more like it), feature requests are flamed if the 5 key developers don't want it...

To be fair, we have those problems as well, but I guess you can always find a project worse off! We tend to flame only completely silly feature requests though - "patch welcome" takes care of any non-silly ones we don't want :p

Look forward to your contributions to the community!

Cheers,
Jonathan

[tschak909]

Hello,

I am one of the core developers of LinuxMCE

Since there seems to be some spreading negativity over our project, I would like to defend our position...

I had started a thread on the forum, which had given a state of the union address. We have over 3 and a half million lines of code, that is our own, not counting the free software code that we appropriate over our message buss, and it has been a very tough ride to literally start from zero when the parent company who originally developed the software (Pluto) all of a sudden changed direction and left us alone to do all development. We had to completely learn a build system that stretched across 6 different platforms, with the ability to build for multiple distributions. This was one of the many problems, this coupled with the fact that there simply isn't enough interest from much needed skilled developers to help with the efforts of getting our next release out, mean that 0810 will take longer to release while many of our users are clamouring for it.

This thread caused many people who are project managers in their professional careers to appear, and immediately suggest various gradients of management, all of which borrowed from many forms of corporate management schools of thought, and took this position from a very condescending viewpoint, which honestly left us feeling a bit threatened. We mentioned that management at this point was not a good idea, and what we needed instead was to strengthen the core development team for the short term, and to revisit the idea of management later, which wound up sparking a huge over 10 page reply span in the thread devolving into one big flaming contest,

In the end, nobody won, and everybody got burned. While the community is understanding that there is a need for action, and this is being done, some of our public face is being damaged, by the perception that we are a closed dictatorship. We're not, we just value action over talk, and this point got lost in the mess.

Just thought i'd bring this to the attention of community members here, before you started hearing about it from angry expatriates.

Thanks for your time,
-Thom

[spiff]

thanks for giving us the other side of the story