Re: The future of Freevo(.org)

Hi Dischi,

thank you, too, for all the work on Freevo and kaa, I had a lot of fun with=
 it and had it running on a home entertainment box in the living room for s=
ome years.

However, after the birth of my first kid, the time available for "hacking" =
would diminish rapidly, and I learned to appreciate "ready solutions" (in m=
y case, a PS3 with the PlayTV tuner) that would get 90% of things done righ=
t, beautiful, and mostly stable, and =96 most importantly =96 get rid of th=
e responsibility in case something does not work.  (With my kids growing up=
, I see more hacking coming up slowly, again. ;-) )

I also learned quite some things from this project, and I still admire the =
coroutine things in kaa, a concept I had some difficulties to get my head a=
round, but which I really love.  On the one hand, it is even easy to explai=
n, but it is quite hard I think to convince people how much easier it would=
 make their lives, when at the same time it looks like it would complicate =
things.

It is always interesting to take part in OSS projects and see how different=
 those projects are, and how similar at the same time =96 for instance, IPy=
thon had very much similar problems to Freevo; the core developers started =
to work on a (more or less) complete rewrite and at the same time maintaine=
d the stable version, contributions for the latter kept flowing in, so that=
 development was split between the two versions, a new maintainer for the s=
table branch was found, the new version had interesting features and concep=
ts, but it was unclear how it would ever finish, the mistake was recognized=
.  IPython was lucky to get external support and funding for a small group =
of dedicated hackers to completely refactor the old codebase and then integ=
rate the juicy bits from the unfinished new version, so everything turned o=
ut really great and eventually, all important features were retained (while=
 getting a set of much more exciting new ones).

I also like how you split up Freevo into multiple parts and made it possibl=
e to use them independently (i.e. kaa.*); the whole architecture was (and s=
till is) great and AFAICS maximizes the possibility that this code is not d=
ead.

At the same time you're right about XBMC, which has a big community and is =
feature-rich, so I will probably have a bit on their side next.

So, thanks again, keep hacking and have fun!
  Hans =

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