[Gambas-user] Future support for Gambas

[David Villalobos Cambronero]

OK, I let them know

----- Original Message ----
From: Benoit Minisini <gambas at ...1...>
To: mailing list for gambas users <gambas-user at lists.sourceforge.net>
Sent: Monday, June 16, 2008 7:31:03 AM
Subject: Re: [Gambas-user] Future support for Gambas

On lundi 16 juin 2008, David Villalobos Cambronero wrote:
> Hi Benoit & All,
>
> I am very happy because next Tuesday I will start teaching Gambas in a
> University (to some teacher and IT professionals), last Saturday I went
> there to prepare everything.
>
> Of course they will pay for it, and of course I have planned to make you a
> donation ;-) just let's wait   that they pay.

Let's hope that they pay you *a lot* :-)

>
> But one of the things they want to do is try to make all their systems in
> Gambas, and they made a very interesting question:
>
> What about Gambas in 5, or 10, or 15 years? Will it still exist? Or Benoit
> and his team will say: Let's stop working in Gambas? The main question is,
> will Gambas have support in the future?
>
> I wrote this mail because I'm very happy that in my third world country
> (Costa Rica) we (and I :-D) are starting in Linux and teach Linux to
> others, so I want to share it with all of you.
>
> Benoit, please let me know your comments
>
> Best regards
>
> David
>

Practically, it is simple: I make Gambas and support it mostly for free, 
provided that I have a job that allows me to live, and make theatre - acting 
classes are very expensive! 

First point: if they want support, they must pay, there is no magic! But as it 
is free software, they don't have to necessarily pay the guy (or the guys) 
who write it. The sources are there, anybody can read it, understand it, and 
support it. It is just a matter of skill, time and elbow grease.

Fortunately, I use Gambas in my job for two years, and so my salary is now 
directly connected to Gambas. So for the next years, support and development 
will be there. But of course you can't know the future!

Second point: At the moment, other Gambas developers do it really for free, so 
their contribution is less important than mine. 

If I stop Gambas now, it will die for sure, as a language that any newbie can 
use is something that apparently frighten other advanced developers that 
could replace me. Maybe a mix of Visual Basic traumatism and eliticism?

But you can't know the future too: if I succeed in making Gambas a web 
application development platform for example, as it is planned, it may 
attract other kind of developers.

Third point: You can ask them to replace Gambas by Visual Basic (for example) 
in their question, and look at the answers. They are not necessarily worse 
for Gambas than Visual Basic. :-)

They must understand that the most important is to keep the developers of the 
final application or the documentation within reach. The developer of the 
language itself is less important. How many Visual Basic applications run on 
the earth, with the sources, the documentation and the developers nowhere to 
be found?

My 2 cents.

-- 
Benoit Minisini

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