Not a flutter developer but shame it had to come to this. Google could have tapped into a bunch of skilled volunteer contributors. Instead PRs and bug reports are just being left to stagnate. If this gets traction hopefully it’s a wakeup call for Google.
Increasingly does seem short-sighted to trust Google with the stewardship of anything these days. I can’t guarantee they won’t randomly kill off half of Google cloud tomorrow, let alone keep a framework on life support.
We definitely have a long backlog of issues and feature requests. We’re the victim of our own success, we don’t have the resources to fix every single bug or add every feature. That’s one of the benefits of open-source though, if something is important to your organization, you can contribute!
However, we take PRs and contributions seriously. We have triage processes to review contributions within a week. If you have examples of PRs stagnating, please let us know. This would be unexpected and something we should fix.
Why is this buried several levels deep in the conversation?
Ultimately, either the Flutter team has the resources to review contributions within a week, or they do not have the necessary resources. If they DO have the ability to do timely reviews of contributions (and a willingness to accept properly-written contributions), then no fork is needed, although perhaps there IS a need for a group of qualified contributors outside of Google to review issue reports and feature requests and produce working contributions. If the Flutter team does NOT have the ability to do timely reviews of contributions then they either need to cooperate with someone who does have that time, OR a fork is needed.
I’ve thought about trying to emulate parts of this, but I’m put off by the way it paywalls content. If I spend time putting together a screencast I want as many people as possible to be able to see that - I consider it as valuable documentation and marketing for my projects.
I guess the larger question is how repeatable this model is. How many open source developers might be able to sustain their projects through paid content like this? Would the model become less effective if many more people were trying to do that, or is there still an enormous under-served market for these kinds of perks?
If your code is FLOSS, and all docs are open, and 10-20 screencasts are available for free, I’d say it’s fine to charge for additional screencasts. And apparently, that made him 725k $.
Would the model become less effective if many more people were trying to do that
I don’t think so. The world is probably big enough for many such projects.
And you always have the option of timing out the paywall for content. For example, you release it for free after a year behind the paywall. It doesn’t have to be a binary choice.
I’m sure Caleb, being from the Laravel ecosystem, was heavily influenced by Laracasts. These are premium, very beginner friendly, paid videos that help you learn Laravel. Laravel is also known for its excellent docs, so these paid videos were very much complementary content.
I don’t understand how this could be the “cornerstone of a series of much larger optimizations”. Copy-and-patch does not use an IR, which seems pretty essential to do more advanced optimizations like type analysis. You could add an optimizing jit and IR later, but it doesn’t seem like you could build it off a copy-and-patch JIT.
Copy-and-Patch is just a code generation technique. You can have your optimizing JIT and IR later, but still use copy-and-patch as its backend to lower your IR to machine code.
Not a flutter developer but shame it had to come to this. Google could have tapped into a bunch of skilled volunteer contributors. Instead PRs and bug reports are just being left to stagnate. If this gets traction hopefully it’s a wakeup call for Google.
Increasingly does seem short-sighted to trust Google with the stewardship of anything these days. I can’t guarantee they won’t randomly kill off half of Google cloud tomorrow, let alone keep a framework on life support.
Hello, Flutter contributor here!
We definitely have a long backlog of issues and feature requests. We’re the victim of our own success, we don’t have the resources to fix every single bug or add every feature. That’s one of the benefits of open-source though, if something is important to your organization, you can contribute!
However, we take PRs and contributions seriously. We have triage processes to review contributions within a week. If you have examples of PRs stagnating, please let us know. This would be unexpected and something we should fix.
Why is this buried several levels deep in the conversation?
Ultimately, either the Flutter team has the resources to review contributions within a week, or they do not have the necessary resources. If they DO have the ability to do timely reviews of contributions (and a willingness to accept properly-written contributions), then no fork is needed, although perhaps there IS a need for a group of qualified contributors outside of Google to review issue reports and feature requests and produce working contributions. If the Flutter team does NOT have the ability to do timely reviews of contributions then they either need to cooperate with someone who does have that time, OR a fork is needed.
Can we make communication about this work?
What is buried several levels deep? The comment to which you are replying is a reply to a top-level comment, so I would call it only two levels deep.
Sounds like you need to reach out to the author of the article
It’s not only happening there but everywhere in Google’s ecosystem. I completely lost faith in all their services.
Massive respect to Caleb for pulling this off.
I’ve thought about trying to emulate parts of this, but I’m put off by the way it paywalls content. If I spend time putting together a screencast I want as many people as possible to be able to see that - I consider it as valuable documentation and marketing for my projects.
I guess the larger question is how repeatable this model is. How many open source developers might be able to sustain their projects through paid content like this? Would the model become less effective if many more people were trying to do that, or is there still an enormous under-served market for these kinds of perks?
I mean… if you want to monetize, you have to paywall something. Very few projects can live off charity.
If your code is FLOSS, and all docs are open, and 10-20 screencasts are available for free, I’d say it’s fine to charge for additional screencasts. And apparently, that made him 725k $.
I don’t think so. The world is probably big enough for many such projects.
And you always have the option of timing out the paywall for content. For example, you release it for free after a year behind the paywall. It doesn’t have to be a binary choice.
I’m sure Caleb, being from the Laravel ecosystem, was heavily influenced by Laracasts. These are premium, very beginner friendly, paid videos that help you learn Laravel. Laravel is also known for its excellent docs, so these paid videos were very much complementary content.
It reminds me of the old commercial I go Coco for Cocoa Puffs! What the heck is a cocoa pod anyway?
It’s a popular package manager for iOS and macOS developers. It’s gradually becoming less relevant though due to Swift Package Manager.
Only gradually now? That’s disappointing.
It’s the fruit in which a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoa_bean develops. (I am assuming you really mean to ask about cocoa pods rather than CocoaPods.)
I don’t understand how this could be the “cornerstone of a series of much larger optimizations”. Copy-and-patch does not use an IR, which seems pretty essential to do more advanced optimizations like type analysis. You could add an optimizing jit and IR later, but it doesn’t seem like you could build it off a copy-and-patch JIT.
Copy-and-Patch is just a code generation technique. You can have your optimizing JIT and IR later, but still use copy-and-patch as its backend to lower your IR to machine code.
Hello, I’m a huge fan of your blog and can’t wait for most posts!
How is LuaJIT remake going? :)
I’m working on the optimizing JIT but it’s still very far from making it functional. A speculatively optimizing JIT is simply a ton of work :)