[mythtv-users] MythTV Frontend for Android released on Market

[Raymond Wagner]

On 2/23/2012 13:52, Glenn Sommer wrote:
> Make this OpenSource, and I could imagine a lot of other people would
> be happy to work on this project!

Experience indicates otherwise.  While the MythTV user base estimated in 
the tens of thousands, the number of users who participate on the 
mailing list, wiki, or submit tickets to trac are in the low single 
digit percent.  Users who submit patches to trac are significantly lower 
still, although admittedly, the often slow turn around time on feature 
patches provides a disincentive towards doing so.

One of the non-developers who has been helping with the audio framework 
writes MythDroid, supporting several backend versions, and allowing 
streaming playback through a separate transcoding daemon that runs along 
side mythbackend.  Right now, he's only got two other people who have 
committed anything.

For better or worse, the open source community suffers from an inability 
to maintain code.  Maintaining code is boring.  If it's your own code, 
you've become a better programmer since you wrote it, so you think it's 
garbage and want to rewrite it.  If it's someone else's code, you have 
your own very different style of programming, so you think it's garbage 
and want to rewrite it.  Since you're not being paid otherwise, you do 
what you want.  The fact that this program exists in the first place is 
indicative of this.  To the author's defense, I have no desire to learn 
Java, and would have done the same thing.