I am new to this community, and I just want to write one initial post about what I have concerns with lately.
When we look at the Open Source world from programmers perspective, it's pretty complete - we have games, science and programming software, office tools and operating system(s). We also have some basic AI implementations, yet with expensive hardware making it less free.
Looking at these categories, these are things we actually do ourselves as programmers. We all need operating systems and we have heavy load of understanding of their limitations; many capable programmers also play games, even some on professional level. Science is a must-be for an engineer to do anything practical at all, everybody comes with some specific formulaes to calculate things about circles, acceleration or even the table of chemical elements. And, finally, using office tools is as trivial as having the pen and papers. We can relate ourselves to mathematicians, who turn coffee and cigarettes to formulaes, and to bridge builders, who revolutionalized the access; people, who invented new architectures and tools, are our kind. So, natively, each programmer knows at least some formulations of physics and chemistry, and in any forum we have someone, who is highly competent to discuss those topics.
So, what we can see, we have built a perfect set of tools we can easily use.
Now, looking at the world of cooking, carpeting, farming etc. - the tools from open source community are really very basic, struggling to cover the critical parts of functionality, and mostly the term "open source" refers to some unknown concepts such as "limited community editions", and it's impossible to convince Google to give some real open source - probably, because it does not exist in it's initial sources. When I happened to set up a CNC machine for wood cutting, and when I was looking for human resource management software, I really got into it - things, which are really so basic that they are worth of a few days of programmer, needing only a list or a controller, they are implemented in low-quality manner, the library versions are outdated, and the communities provide very funny guidelines about programming. Somebody worked on the code for 6 months, 10 years ago, and this version is still the most decent without any updates, and people are using it as a quality standard.
So we have kind of class society we kind of wanted to avoid - people, who know, how to code, are the privileged class of open source, who gets any service. The reason is very basic - as we have sciences, offices and utilizing-operating-system computers very much in programmer's lives, moreover the scientists themselves easily learn to code at least something and they are careful to make at least the basic algorithms work - when we want to know something about a waiter or carpenter, we hardly know any of their problems and solutions. Afaik in any programming company, there are programmers, who build house, grow plants, all of us do some carpeting and things such as fixing the cables; these are easy to learn for an engineer of any kind and indeed they do those things themselves - we have minorities around those less-developing areas, with many of us left them simply with boredom of having grandfather-invented technologies. Each programming company has some people, who work in farms for their fathers, who cook very carefully and who build something for themselves and construct their moble; indeed we are men - but these numbers are very small to create big, united collectives. Finally, those people really concentrate, for 6 months, on their almost-hobby, but they do not form long-term, stable teams.
I think this is because we don't imagine those things - theoretically, probably we really have implemented each of the important equations of those people, and also some UI's, but those look like coming from someone's school-time, containing simply an algorithm from something in the book. We don't have a range of usage scenarios, high level of competition etc., in those areas.
Thus, I would suggest to do something like "Open Project" in addition to "Open Source", where people from any field are invited to create a project, an AI prototype, screenshots of UI's and explanations of needs and use cases. Such team might involve less programmers and create more decent team of multiple areas. People, for example, from farming - they can be logical and clear-thinking, and they might understand the flow of screens and forms of calculations, and some of the possibilities, very naturally like men understand the wood. Basically, we need those people to carry out the project plans; and for different teams it might be requirements, specifications or even ai-assisted prototypes. We should have a friendly environment, where programmers, instead of looking for other programmers, look for such people.
There should also be business models for such things. In general, it's also hard case, why we have rather programmers in open source communities, than designers, testers etc. - while we have designs and testing of open source projects, it's hard to write specifically a home page of open source designer.
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