Thanks LFP6 for this context, this is very helpful.
Thanks to all for their interest in helping sort out the code - very much appreciate your enthusiasm and generosity of spirit. I have to agree with LFP6 on open source not being an option at this particular moment, especially if we have any security issues to consider, primarily as I explain elsewhere due to the fact that with limited resources on the senior dev side, and with limited volunteer bandwidth as well, there is no guarantee that we have the collective time to ensure open source would get the eyes on the code it needs to succeed. So even if we each have the best intentions and competency, if the next person does not, the community is not large enough to provide the oversight that a project such as Mozilla or Linux enjoys, for example.
There are many discussions on the web, e.g. stack exchange, about pros and cons of open source, and appropriate ecosystems in which they thrive or fail. I believe in the case of a large ecosystem with many contributors and senior devs to provide peer review, that open source has significant security advantages, provided that peer review and Live push gating is in fact happening functionally.
However, in an ecosystem as small as ours, there is simply not enough senior dev time to provide code reviews and manage deployments at a scale much larger than we already have.
Therefore for those who wish to do player dev, I heartily recommend LFP6’s analysis in the Limited Resources post, which provides an excellent and informative review of the areas in which player dev is currently active, and outlines the current constraints of player dev as well.
At some time in the future, things may change of course. But as things stand now, I add one more voice of caution about the fact that fully open source player dev may simply not be possible or advisable at this time due to very real time limitations on our senior devs, and the very very very tiny niche community pool in which this particular form of life is taking shape.
We have been through multiple calls for the community to simply QA various dev changes or prototypes, and at times the volume of response has been modest enough that while people here do care and try their best, at this time we can by no means _depend_ on a community this small to provide proper open source dev oversight. At other times, like with Vineet’s 3D prototype, the volume of response was so enthusiastic that we had more feedback than could be implemented. So whether the community response is large or small, the bottleneck is at the core dev team level - the purpose of my limited resources post is to explore how to address this very bottleneck.
I remember Rhiju mentioned that changing our expectations of the community may be healthy, in not expecting our community to be huge and all powerful, but rather small and targeted efforts, applying our most dedicated volunteers to the niche skill they do best: designing molecules. This is also why I wish to ensure that volunteers have time for what we really need them to do: crunch RNA. Because there are so few of us. And the dev stuff, I really wish to see sorted by a professional.
All that being said, I may still myself pursue building out infrastructure to organize whatever player dev opportunities we do have, and anyone who wants to contribute, we are always grateful for whatever you can and wish to do. If we can solve our dev issues with volunteer work, I will be only grateful. But there are real constraints that we are working with, so here they are, and hopefully we can choose how to spend our time most effectively within these constraints.