[IGDA_indies] open source survival

[Brandon J. Van Every]

After losing a lot of money getting bogged down in my own planetary
rendering code, I started looking around for open source technologies
that might make development less painful.  A year later I'm exceedingly
aware of the open source landscape.  But, I have nothing to show for it
in the way of proven productivity solutions.  This leaves me in a
quandry:

- is it worth trying to point out good open source technologies to other
indie developers?
- or should I just tell other indie developers to avoid open source like
the plague?

Technologies I continue to be interested in, although I haven't proven
the utility of any of them yet:

- OCaml  http://caml.inria.fr
- various Schemes, for instance possibly
http://www.plt-scheme.org/software/mzscheme/
- The Nebula Device 2  http://nebuladevice.cubik.org

Technologies I'm dubious about:

- Python http://www.python.org because it's slow, and I need to do 3D
and AI problems.
- SDL http://www.sdl.org because it looks like a shaky architecture

and I wish I had $1 for the corpses of all the open source projects I've
downloaded and tried to compile in the past year.  My conclusion is the
vast majority of them ain't worth it, and only large projects stand any
chance of being worth anything.  Another rule of thumb is if the project
doesn't have a VC++ .sln or .dsw file, they aren't serious about Windows
compatibility.


Cheers,                         www.indiegamedesign.com
Brandon Van Every               Seattle, WA

"We live in a world of very bright people building
crappy software with total shit for tools and process."
                                - Ed Mckenzie