Thoughts and Ramblings

It has been a while since I updated this. I promise a followup to my previous post about open source attitudes is coming up. I realized from the comments that a few of my statements didn’t come across exactly as I had intended them.

Well, with the Perian donations, Chris and I went to buy some AV equipment. This enables us to test out Perian in other situations than we had originally intended. Each of us got an AppleTV and a 5.1 system. As a result, I have already figured out a way to do AC3 passthrough in a much less hacky method, which means it should be more reliable. However, I found out that with some decoders, like the one my dad has, even this method still fails. Apparently, some decoders require that the SPDIF header specify that the data is encoded digital audio instead of searching for a correctly formatted header in the PCM data. Oh well.

With my recent work on Fire, Adium, Perian, and A52Codec, I have come to realize several misunderstandings concerning open source software.

Ask anyone involved in Open Source Software (OSS), whether it be the users or the developers, and you will find there is often a disconnect between the two groups. The users are upset with the elitist attitudes of the developers and the developer are upset with the whining of the users. Why does this happen? The answer is simple, people are greedy.

Well, we had some fun with Perian today. First it started when macupdate decided that they were going to post a fake 1.0 of Perian. You can read the details if you like. Since this is clearly something we didn’t want, we had to figure out how it happened. My guess is that someone saw the new website design in development within the subversion repository, clicked the download link that was there, and noticed it download a version later than what we have on the website.

Well, Perian is finally nearing a release. I wonder how much press we will get over this one, since it is finally hitting version 1.0. Chris (project manager) seems to think that Perian will be bigger than Adium (which he also manages). Considering how well version 0.5 has been received (over a quarter million downloads), I think I now believe him. Then we get to start work on version 1.1, which will include optimizations to what we did in 1.0.