At 04:07 PM 12/12/99 , Ross Bencina wrote:
>Hi Giorgio and list members,
>
>I'm just back from holidays and reading the SAOG proposal...
I hope you had nice holidays. Welcome back.
>It seems clear that Eric's commitments will inevatably lead to a
>redistribution of responsibilities within the SA community. This could
>include the establishment of a formal "open group" if that is useful for
>commercial and or EU participants. However, I feel that Giorgio's proposal
>represents a narrowing of the field in comparison to the current MIT based
>saol-dev / saol-user situation.
I move from my last reply to Marek. The MIT based saol-dev / saol-user is
one story, the EPFL-MIT proposal for SAOG is another story, even if the
two things are in the beginning interleaved. The SAOG proposal has been
posted to saol-dev as an already established environment of potentially
interested people; it has been posted to the MPEG-4 Audio group reflector
as another (I'm sorry, bigger) established environment of potentially
interested universities and companies, and apparently has been welcomed
by the MPEG convenor as a "very good initiative"; it will be posted to other
reflectors/individuals as well in the near future.
>While I sympathise with Giorgio's fears regarding the fate of an open-source
>implementation of SAINT, I can't help but feel that making it the
>centerpiece of an "SA Open Group" runs against the grain of "SA as a
>standard not an implementation" and also against notions of survival of the
>open-source fittest. Personally I'd like to see the MIT lists and web site
>continue as the vendor neutral forum for SA developers. I'd be happy to help
>out with cleaning up the site.
Please read more carefully points 7 and 8 of the SAOG proposal. After that,
it is very difficult to lead a discussion on cooking if you don't experience
yourself the difference between the flavour of black pepper and white
pepper, and why you use one or another and in which context. And so
on...
>That said, I do think that if you want to establish SAINT as distributed
>open-source development project it will need it's own web infrastructure
>a-la mozilla or python. Perhaps the "SAINT Open Group" would be a more
>appropriate title.
And it won't be useful to anybody. I am sorry but I suggest again to read
carefully the proposal and my reply to Micheal last week. I am not interested
in releasing part of SAINT for SAINT itself, otherwise I will not do it for the
explained reasons you sympathise with. I am interested in seeing it as
a kind of first on-line SA laboratory to start with, if it will work. If in 6
months it will be completely "forgot" to another more interesting project,
that new project will become the most interesting SA laboratory. I did not
think of SAOG to release SAINT, as I already said once (and will not say
three times), I thought of an initiative to which SAINT could be useful,
and the MIT understood this idea and the need of it, helping to refine it
and supporting it as, let's say, a "co-founder".
>It also occurred to me that if the definition of SAOG was narrowed to be
>even more SAINT-dev specific it could co-exist along side the current MIT
>lists and site.
To my understanding this is not under discussion even if the definition of
SAOG would be less SAINT-dev specific (and perhaps it should be, if
everybody only catches points 4,5 and 6).
My best regards,
Giorgio
__________________________________________________________________
Giorgio ZOIA
Integrated Systems Laboratory - DE/LSI - EPFL
CH-1015 Lausanne - SWITZERLAND
Phone: + 41 21 693 69 79 E-mail: Giorgio.Zoia@epfl.ch
Fax: +41 21 693 46 63
__________________________________________________________________
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