2012-08-20, 17:30
(2012-08-20, 15:56)davilla Wrote: We pushed it out into the open and not one open source person besides us EVER looked at improving the code. No one. zero. zip, nada. If I had not put it into XBMC, I doubt than any other OpenSOurce media app would have picked it up. Open Source is great but the reality is that the number of people that can actually look at kernel/device code and understand much less improve it is quite small. Now if this is how something 'simple' like CrystalHD was treated, anything more complex such as a video driver becomes even less likely to receive attention and resources that it needs to be practical.
Sorry, I normally lurk but just want to chime in.
Even though the people who care about those features normally are not the people who have the technical knowledge to do something about it, if there are Kickstarter-style campaign to raise money to attack specific, popular feature/issues - such as Android port, certain chip's hardware acceleration etc. I suspect a lot of people would be interested to chip in and pay for experts' time, experts that wouldn't normally be interested to work for free on project that they have no stake/interest in; or to pay for expenses of the devs so they can spend more time on the project than they could for free.
The problem with regular project donations is that you are never sure that you're money is put into improving the aspect of the software that you personally need/care about, and as a result there's never that much feedback the development progress of that feature which you care about. If there's a campaign set-up to attack specific issues such as Android port, I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is to get features I care about closer to reality.
In the end, it couldn't hurt to do an interest check to see which issue is popular and is feasible (seeing as A10 can't proceed without Allwinner's suppport beyond lip service).
