There's a lot of complaints here about how slow the project is and that it's single maintainer, but also how valuable and useful it is
Is this a funding problem?
Do we need to have the xz conversation again?
I really do love OSS but we need to figure out something where valuable projects aren't just hobbies or side projects (not even a side hustle). With all this time can we not improve on our model? To get funding where it's needed? This is also a friendly reminder than most big tech companies will donation match, so maybe send $5 to a few of your favorite projects. You're making big money now, you can buy a few beers for you friend (and put a few on the company's dime).
Honestly, it's a general FOSS problem in my opinion. sigrok is rather niche and spans a wide skill set across the various sub-projects. We have C code for 8051 for fx2lafw, we have C code for libsigrok, C++ code for PulseView, C and python for libsigrokdecode, and so on. There are plenty of people who drop off patches and move on but finding people who are willing to stay and take ownership of something is a challenge.
Money would only help insofar as it would allow me to buy hardware I could test drivers with. However, I don't have the space for such equipment and even a simple scope costs so much that it would probably eat up a year of donations.
I appreciate your thoughtfulness, though. In the end, all I ask is for contributors to see things from the project's point of view and try to make things as easy as possible. I hope that more people will join our efforts once the project has more visible signs of life again.
Yes, I agree. The FOSS model doesn't seem to be working even though I believe it can. So I still will try to rally people to chip in here and there. I think many devs are happy to work on their projects even without huge tech salaries and many small contributions can add up. So it is a win for everyone (I think I'm a bit surprised -- not really -- that the EA people don't advocate for more FOSS donating).
But I do think this is in part related to the "staying around" issue. No one wants to do the boring stuff and it's easier to just give people a salary and throw that under their umbrella. Hard to justify this in volunteer work.
I do wish we would have a real conversation about this on HN and we could actually dig deep into it. But I think it is easy to think it is not a problem because things appear to be working smoothly, so cracks are easy to ignore and it is easy to not think about if we could be more efficient. I definitely don't know a solution to the problem but I'm sure given some time there's more than enough smart people around here that understand different aspects of the problem that it could be solved.
That said, I do personally appreciate your project, and have recently gotten into some hardware hacking (need to fix some devices...). And I hope you focus more on the encouragement in the thread over the criticism (even though some is valid, constraints matter).
On a completely different note, is there any plans for a full TUI? Or someone that is doing this?
Is this a funding problem?
Do we need to have the xz conversation again?
I really do love OSS but we need to figure out something where valuable projects aren't just hobbies or side projects (not even a side hustle). With all this time can we not improve on our model? To get funding where it's needed? This is also a friendly reminder than most big tech companies will donation match, so maybe send $5 to a few of your favorite projects. You're making big money now, you can buy a few beers for you friend (and put a few on the company's dime).