[Dune] Dune, quo vadis ?

[Oswald Benedikt]

Dear Dune people, having used Dune for some months now with increasing
enthusiasm and following the mailing list closely, let me share some
some ideas. First, I apologize if I may be somewhat plain in my formulations.

The future development of Dune certainly needs a broadly agreed upon process for
making decisions.

But please, dare some freedom in this, I appeal to you: forget about committees,
speakers, 'richtliniediskussionen' etc.

Projects like Dune live from a certain 'chaotic' moment; it is this very moment
that enables creativity and innovative solutions and which attracts contributing
talent.

I am afraid that you will eventually deter innovative minds from contributing
and lose much talent.

There are more than enough examples where over-regulation and complicated
structures stalled once hopeful projects. Ultimately, this could lead to 
Dune's insignificance.

With respect to changing licence policies for future, possibly commercial, use
of Dune, as someone who has experienced a bit of the commercial world, let me
say this: requesting 5% (of what?) for the right to use Dune commercially,
will just not work.

Dune at present is an interesting library for scientific work.
To make it attractive for commercial ventures it will need even more
work; you may have a look at the Opencascade project (www.opencascade.org).
These people make a living from offering support to Opencascade users, but
still the Opencascase framework is completely free, for any use.
This has propelled Opencascade's significance.

It is not very important to polish every detail of Dune, but it is quite
relevant to make it fit for being used in technically significant projects:
e.g. being able to effieciently operate meshes with millions of tetrahedra.

Believe me, if a company uses Dune for their commercial application, it has
a definite interest in the long-term well-being of Dune, it might even
financially sponsor people or research groups and the result of this
will then again be available to the whole Dune user community.

Cultivating a liberal usage policy combined with a focus
on application developers, will increase the scientific
impact of Dune in the long term considerably, anyway.


With my very best regards, Benedikt


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Benedikt Oswald, Dr. sc. techn., dipl. El. Ing. ETH, www.psi.ch, Computational Accelerator Scientist
Paul Scherrer  Institute (PSI), CH-5232 Villigen, Suisse, benedikt.oswald at psi.ch, +41(0)56 310 32 12
quamquam sint sub aqua, sub aqua maledicere temptant. http://maxwell.psi.ch/amaswiki/index.php/User:BenediktOswald 
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------