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I love FOSS, and even though it doesn't work as a model for everything, there are some kinds of applications that just seem to be a perfect fit.
I think one such application is software for CAD as it relates to construction and land surveying(my trade). Much of the design and record data from the field must be accessible for decades and this fact alone builds a strong case for using open formats. Unfortunately, and much to the chagrin of all of the surveyors I know, there seems to be a slow push by the software side of the industry away from using the open formats of old toward proprietary formats. A lot of this is caused by the ever increasing complexity (and reinventing of the wheel) of design software; however, when it comes to boots the ground, not much has changed with means and methods. There are only so many ways to accomplish what we do and most of it has already been optimized. The result of this push toward proprietary formats and overkill software has been the abandonment of good, functional, and simple proprietary software that just worked. Many of the companies that created this good software no longer exist because they have been embraced and extinguished by larger players. There is a growing reality that the only option to keep work going is to pay many 1000's of dollars a year per person for what should be a fairly simple piece of software. This is not the kind of software that would require a lot of support.
So my question is this: What is the best way for me to begin a successful FOSS project like this?
For the record I am not a programmer, but I dabble from time to time. I could foresee it being a fairly easy sell to convince the powers that be to throw some money (one time cost) at a development team to create for us what we need. Between the different companies and contacts that I know in the industry, a sort of corporate crowd funding effort is not far fetched. Why the heck isn't this already done for all the standard corporate software, rather than paying needless licensing fees into perpetuity? Sometimes software just becomes stable. A FOSS solution would be a godsend to smaller mom and pop operations and I think it could cure some of my resentment of people constantly breaking good things for the sake of "progress".
BTW, I have looked at some of the existing open source CAD software and found it all pretty wanting. Could requesting special functionality from these developers be a better route than starting from scratch? Thanks in advance!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Thursday January 04 2018, @11:21AM (1 child)
Instead of writing a new program, consider whether you can take one of the existing, and add to it so that it no longer is wanting. Adding yet another Open Source project doing the same thing just further dilutes the amount of work done on each, including yours. Unless you manage to be so much better that everyone immediately switches to your program.
Note that this is not the same as requesting the functionality from the developers. "I'd like to have this functionality, please implement it." probably has a much lower chance to succeed than "I'd like to implement this functionality, would you accept it into your code?"
Also note that if you cannot contribute to an existing project for whatever reason (be it that the maintainers don't share your idea of what is desirable, be it that you cannot convince the funding providers to invest in something where someone else controls the main repository), it may still be a better idea to fork one of the existing projects than to start a new one from scratch.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 04 2018, @12:19PM
Or the also popular "who can I throw money at to get this implemented?"