====== Orienting Future Developments ======

I am facing a cruel dilemma: on one hand, I want to continue the development of software I contributed to for years or software I created ; on the other hand, I have to realise I just can't pursue in all directions.

**Free software is great to the end-user** but it generates several **costs to a developer**, when he is not backed up by companies or sponsors. Yes, everything is done during his free time. In my opinion, this model works best when you are a student (lots of holidays!) or working for a company that develops free or open source software. Otherwise, you are rapidly caught by other costs if you try to get a "normal" life: //(i)// human costs, e.g. you sleep  less because you are absorbed by your project(s), //(ii)// social costs because you are not devoting much time to other activities like hiking, partying/clubbing, getting in touch with years old friends, dating girls, etc.

About the financial costs. I generally buy what I need for development/testing purposes, without looking at the expenses. e.g. I bought MacOS X Leopard earlier this year whereas I really have no need to use it personally but for development (the system is still sub-optimal, I will get back to it in a future post). I am not developing shareware, so the money comes from my pockets. I recently sorted my papers and wanted to gather some stats about my computer hardware or software related expenses. I wish I hadn't as more than 70% of them were directly used for OSS development. I won't tell you the exact amount here but it looks quite indecent, even for a 7 years timeframe. Fortunately, some chipmakers were helpful, otherwise this would have increased the costs (though, by a very small margin)!

It's true that enthusiasts generally do not count the expenses of their hobbies, neither the time devoted to them. However, the latter can exactly be a problem for reasons I mentioned earlier. As a side note, I have been very busy the past months with other (personal) "projects". Yes, you can think this is a very selfish decision to not finish [[en:blog:2007:10:31:some_news|some things I started earlier]], but I wanted/needed to do other activities, e.g. lately, that was another sort of optimisation problems + sometimes nothing at all simply to relax my brain and sleep more the weekend! For the record, I generally sleep only 5 to 6 hours per night, which seems to be the optimal duration for me nowadays (vs. 8 to 9 hours 11 years ago), so only 3 long to 4 short sleep cycles. Even worse, the most optimal time to start to sleep is between 00:25 and 00:55, and I mean it. Last night, I tried 23:27 because I felt very sleepy. What a bad idea, I got up around 4:12! :-(

Overall, in order to achieve my new personal goals, I came to the conclusion that **I still need to reduce my OSS developments for at least the next 4 to 6 months**. IOW, reduce to one project, at most. I know I failed to reply to your mails efficiently. However, I will try again but bear in mind I probably won't look at solutions right away. It's better I don't make you promises I might not honour...

Is there another solution? Yes, win the lottery and get rid of a full-time job so that one can devote any time he wants onto a particular project. However, let's get back to the real world, this is just highly unlikely to happen. So, costs reduction choices have to be made. This is a very difficult problem because I equally like every project I contribute to and they can require the same amount of time to work on. Further thoughts lead to the conclusion that I will be suspending any development on [[en:projects:basilisk2|Basilisk II]] or [[en:projects:sheepshaver|SheepShaver]]. Why? Well, it was brought to my attention that Red Hat / Fedora uses [[en:projects:nspluginwrapper|nspluginwrapper]] by default. So, there is now probably **more than a million nspluginwrapper users**, either they know they use it or not (assuming desktop users would browse the Internet with contents requiring a plug-in). Henceforth, more people should benefit from nspluginwrapper development than from Mac emulators. Besides, I also need it for one professionnal project.

In summary:
  * Basilisk II / SheepShaver: //suspended//. Note this doesn't mean indefinitely stopped, I still have many ideas planned and even started to implement some of them! It means I may get bored by other activities and come back to do what I used to be good at instead.
  * NSPluginWrapper: //active development//. I will also post recent happenings around this project. You may be surprised to see what it could be used for nowadays. There will also likely be a new location to host the project with lists and bug reporting tools. SVN is already available [[http://svn.beauchesne.info/svn/gwenole/projects/nspluginwrapper/|here]].

BTW, I came across [[http://www.ohloh.net/|Ohloh]] and I compiled the projects I work on to [[http://www.ohloh.net/accounts/15289|here]]. Ohloh has interesting metrics but I have several problems with it:
  * The cost of a project is probably over-valued, at least in terms of human efforts (men-year).
  * The name is somewhat crappy. Really, what the hell does "Ohloh" mean? Then, my brain tried some word associations and came by very bad ones. I hope the authors didn't meant that...

{{tag>general projects}}