Free Flight, Free Speech

I hear mention of 'them vs us' and this having never occured in the last 20 years and it's made me want to say something..

In the last 20 years the 'game or sim' modding community has changed beyond all recognition, yet fligthgear still uses the same 'business model' (for want of a better word) that it did at the start and to my mind has become more entrenched in that model.

Flightgear isn't to my mind run by flight sim enthuseasts... it might well have started out like that but 20 years later for the guys in charge it's not flight simming that rocks their boat but the solving of problems using code that does ( be honest with yourselves)... Yes it's within a flight sim environment but that's now more by luck that judgement.

This has created the friction, flight sim enthuseasts wanting to have some input especially at a content level, of quality standards, user interaction, content storage and distribution, MP servers etc... and what we've got is 'programmers' dictating what can and cannot happen.

Flightgear as a project and as a community needs to restucture for todays world creating two separate parts...

1) The world engine developers

2) The modding community

With the line drawn clearly as to what each does and doesn't interfere with.... and a level of respect for the work each party does.

The world engine developers should create a 'commercial type' platform on which the simmers can create content, licensing out this world engine to partners who, operate servers and design a sim around.. This world shouldn't be restricted to just flight, but allow for road and rail, ship simming... with API's that allow the modding community to push the world as far as it can go discovering more problems for the world developers to solve.

Flightgear has a head start on the opposition that WILL adopt this model in years to come... look at 'Next Gen flight sim' or Outerra... all being set up with modding community as it exists today in mind. If however Flightgear continues on their present course the disconnect between the programmers and the flight simmers will just get greater with more friction.

I'm calling on Curt to open his eyes and see the truth of it... be brave and restructure flightgear, go forward into a new era of sim world development and content development and put a stop to this friction.

Simon

Great note, great insight, and a great call for Curtis to act in the proper direction, Simon.

May I add that the FG latest tendency** is to make a bigger gap between who/what is a developer and who/what is an user. The "average user" they call it.

I think, in an opensource development situation, such as Fligthgear, that distinction should be fuzzy, at best. Essentially, using Raymond's quote

http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s03.html

E. Raymond wrote:Another strength of the Unix tradition, one that Linux pushes to a happy extreme, is that a lot of users are hackers too. Because source code is available, they can be effective hackers. This can be tremendously useful for shortening debugging time. Given a bit of encouragement, your users will diagnose problems, suggest fixes, and help improve the code far more quickly than you could unaided.

6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.

which is something that, albeit slower, even Thorsten had come to realize

Thorsten Renk in the devel.list wrote:* someone submits a patch with a fix that turns out to be a hack creating
problems elsewhere
-> it should be easy to explain that - and either create a strategy to
change the actual problem together, or, if that is complicated, accept the
hack provisionally with the understanding that it's going to replaced once
a proper fix arrives
In my actual reality, 80% of fixes someone submitted to me turn out to be
real fixes - while it happens that someone mis-diagnoses a problem, that's
not the norm.

Footnote

** Could this tendency be at the heart of the current situation facing flightgear?

Well, I am programmer as much as programmer can be. So, coming from the other side, having users who are willingly test, put time in to expand on the code the developers deliver in form of more aircraft or more scenery and, from the point of view of a programmer quite important, deliver a lot of input, is priceless. It's not that a programmer can implement everything, users suggest, there are technical limits and of course time restrictions, but at least, it gives a nice work list.
However, the situation is kind of multilayered in a system like FG. I tinker on planes, fine, but I also fly planes in FG. Almost everybody does. So, the line between aircraft dev and user is already blurred. And since core devs also use their program, they should be also considered both, dev and user, at the same time. So, the "average user" is from the start already either a dev of some kind or at least a potential dev. And yes, artists, like livery makers fall in those categories as well.

Hooray wrote

"I have exchanged more messages with senior contributors recently than I care to admit, including messages with Curt
so they, and he in particular, know exactly where I am standing, which doesnt much have to do with picking a "side" or as misrepresenting where I am standing (as per Bomber's comment), as usual Bomber is trying too hard to partition this community according to his own agenda (see his most recent feat/topic), so no surprises there. "

I've been accused of this before, and it's a simplistic counter argument which is erroneous that I'm implying that a member of the core development team can't be flight sim enthusiasts..

Let's be clear I'm not saying that.... I'm saying that at present a large number of the core development team were programmers who became involved in a flight sim. As such it was programming and finding an outlet to these urges that brought them to flightgear.

Others like myself were flight sim enthusiasts and came to flightgear to resolve the urge to fly and over time learnt to programme so as to add content.

Like it or not the mind set of these two types of contributors are different...

Refusing to admit that these 2 types of people exist with flightgear and that they bring different drives, direction and skills to the party is to my mind partly to blame for the friction.

"In the last 20 years the 'game or sim' modding community has changed beyond all recognition, yet fligthgear still uses the same 'business model' (for want of a better word) that it did at the start and to my mind has become more entrenched in that model."

Refusing to accept that the above is true is simply bonkers.... I mean 20 years ago there wasn't such a think as a modding community for games and yet today some of the most successful games use these people within their community to enhance the product

Hey Bomber... so you are part of a triangle, or so I've heard

Welcome in. That's the strength of our side of the force. We welcome in people willing to collaborate with development, bug-hunting, etc.

Well I've given up on that thread over at FG forum.... it's been twisted beyond all recognition and Thorsten's use of a post I made 3 years ago kinda explains my point about the bullying.... and they're now saying nothing new about me that I've not heard from them before.

I don't go into threads he's instigated and attempt to stear it in the direction of my choosing, I respect the other posters in the thread too much to do that. He on the other hand after the thread became interesting discussing just what we thought was happening threw in loads of mathematics. .. I'm not against maths but I just didn't think it was the right time to use it to attempt to describe the many complex things that were happening. The thread died after this post and following 2 weeks of quiet I attempted to resurrect it hoping he'd moved on to another topic but no he came back to create a personal attack on me.

The thread died again and nothing got developed or worked on....

This attitude isn't a help to FG... or anyone else using jsbsim..