Thanks for the useful information everyone. We are going to keep working on getting farsight2 and telepathy-farsight working. We apologize if we haven't been doing things the open source way. We are just a couple students who are new to the open source world. We're still learning how to do things. I look forward to talking to some of you further to figure out the problems in our project.<div> <br></div><div>-Taylor Rose</div><div>OVC Devel Team<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 11:07 PM, Kevin Mark <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:kevin.mark@verizon.net">kevin.mark@verizon.net</a>></span> wrote:<br> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">On Fri, Jun 25, 2010 at 12:59:28PM +0100, Sjoerd Simons wrote:<br> <snip><br> <div class="im">> Earlier this year we did some changes in both farsight and Gstreamer which<br> > caused issues when combining certain versions of the two. Ofcourse if you had<br> > raised the issue you were seeing with us at the time we could have helped you<br> > out there...<br> ><br> > > So at this point we need help from the upstream. Without either the<br> > > Gstreamer bug fixed or some help using Farsight we are at an impasse. We<br> > > would appreciate any help from upstream community members. Feel free to<br> > > pull our repo and check out our code. If you're unfamiliar with the XO's<br> > > you should know that the code requires the Sugar environment to run.<br> <br> </div>You raise good points. It is quite a change of perspetive to join a group that<br> expect you to 'bother' them and pick their brain, as opposed to a community<br> where people do things in isolation. So I would guess that the people leading<br> the course and the students are learning how to fix this process as fast as<br> they can but have missed some things. Hopefully you and they can critque it and<br> find ways to get the TOS program even more engaged in the FLOSS way more. It<br> will benefit the course and the FLOSS community.<br> <div class="im"><br> ><br> > So at this point i need to go of on a bit of a rant. I did check out your code<br> > and it looks like "My first video conferencing application", which is fair<br> > enough really as for most if not all of you it will be your first video<br> > conferencing application.<br> ><br> > It is sad though that a project that afaik is partially meant to teach how to<br> > do open source development seems to have completely failed at actually using<br> > open source properly.<br> ><br> > The power of FOSS is partially that you can stand on the shoulders of giants<br> > and that you can work together to move the state of the art forward in<br> > such a way that it benefits all parties. As an added benefit, in most active<br> > projects there are always some people that are happy to help you with the<br> > initial learning curve and/or issues you're having.<br> ><br> > What i've seen from this project over the past few months is someone once or<br> > twice appearing on our IRC channel, scattergunning a load of questions, getting<br> > some help and then disappearing again. Which doesn't seem like a great way of<br> > engaging an open source project... To make matters worse at the end of march i<br> > sent an e-mail to some of your projects leads, asking how things were going and<br> > if any mentoring or other help was needed, to which i've never got any reply..<br> > Seems like they missed a much-needed oppurtunity there.<br> <br> </div>Again, I hope you and they can meet to discuss how they could have better<br> taught this point and ways they can convey to the students how to engage<br> projects in a way that you feel is appropriate.<br> <div class="im"><br> ><br> > Judging from looking at your code and the experiences above, your project<br> > worked in the same way a lot of companies that don't actually understand open<br> > source work. You grabbed various open source bits that were available and that<br> > you could get to work without spending too much effort on them, wrote<br> > your program in somewhat of a vacuum, slapped a nice open source license on it<br> > and said: look, look, we did open source isn't it amazing...<br> <br> </div>I dont expect the course to be static, I assume they will learn as they go and<br> will do better next time with feedback like you have given. They are trying to<br> get people engaged in the FLOSS community, so hopefully the students have felt<br> the excitment and will work to grow our community.<br> <div><div></div><div class="h5"><br> <br> ><br> > What you seem to have ended up with is a stepping stone that allowed you to<br> > look over the fence that was directly in front of you, only to see there is a<br> > big and dense jungle on the other side blocking your path. While you could<br> > have been part of an expedition with many years of combined experience on how<br> > to get through such a jungle...<br> <br> </div></div><font color="#888888">--<br> | .''`. == Debian GNU/Linux ==.| <a href="http://kevix.myopenid.com." target="_blank">http://kevix.myopenid.com.</a>.....|<br> | : :' : The Universal OS....| <a href="http://mysite.verizon.net/kevin.mark/.|" target="_blank">mysite.verizon.net/kevin.mark/.|</a><br> | `. `' <a href="http://www.debian.org/.|" target="_blank">http://www.debian.org/.|</a> <a href="http://counter.li.org" target="_blank">http://counter.li.org</a> [#238656]|<br> |___`-____Unless I ask to be CCd,.assume I am subscribed._________|<br> <br> </font></blockquote></div><br></div>