Before I get into my comments, I just want to ask that if you haven't bought the dev a coffee, please buy him a coffee. Personally, I have bought several with the intent of covering for those who cannot. Our dev has earned it.
I am just going to say that Connect is awesome. Even through early development, when there were huge issues, it progressed at a good pace. And yeah, it has gotten super stable and functions great as a simple and easy to use Lemmy client.
I would also like to make clear that I respect this app as the sole devs creation. He/She is 100% able to direct this project as they see fit. Period.
However. One person development teams can be a serious risk to the longevity and stability of an app. People get tired and burned out. People have actual lives outside of working on a single app. People can just vanish from dev work. That is all normal.
With the recent Lemmy instance updates and some subtle bugs that are showing, my concern is that it may become a much larger challenge to keep this app up to date. In my limited dev experience, core API changes (or API bugs) are a royal pain in the ass to deal with. A person could spend more time just keeping their app functional instead of developing new features or working on minor bugs.
I was hoping that people in this community that have experience with the development of large open source projects, can contribute ideas for our dev that may make it palatable to open this project up to additional contributors.
I think the biggest things I would like to call out is that if this project is opened, it may damage any revenue that is being generated by this app for the dev and I don't want to see that happen. (People gotta work and people gotta eat. )
What open source licenses are available that would keep full control of this app in the hands of the original dev? (Is that even a viable option?)
Quite simply, other than opening this app up fully, I don't quite know exactly what I am asking for. It would be nice to keep full control of this app in the hands of the dev, while also allowing community development.
Just to reiterate, this post is not meant to be rude or pushy. If anything I said came off that way, it was absolutely not the intent and offer a humble apology if it did.
I taught myself QuickBasic as it was the only thing I knew that was related to copying C64 BASIC out of magazines. (QBasic was packaged with DOS 3.11 I think and I was able to get a full copy of QuickBasic somehow. That was about +30 years ago? Dunno. I was about 12 at the time.) I didn't know what other languages were out there besides TurboPascal. I did learn simple Pascal, but that was a short chapter.
I actually met someone else in the area that was learning to code, and of course, we wanted to write a game. The only way to code for a mouse at the time was to write an INT33 handler, so it kicked off our interest in asm. (I still use asm for MCU stuff on occasion, but it's limited.) I quickly diverged into writing some really nifty.. eh.. "boot sector code" so that kicked off my career in security.
And yeah, it's the same phenomenon for me: I just think in terms of bits and bytes getting shifted around and I still refuse to believe in "magic". (Slight jab at Rust coders there, but in good fun.)
Fast forward to today, I train "kids" fresh out of college as part of my job now. The first thing I do is start giving them weird tasks that require they actually understand how something like an
fopen()
actually works.(Funny story. I refused to "show my work" in math class for simple f(x) problems as I viewed it as unoptimized code. Lulz. I was such an autistic dork.)