[Dune] Dune, quo vadis ?

[Christian Engwer]

Dear Benedikt,

thank you for this mail. You brought everything down to the point.

Christian

On Thu, Jan 25, 2007 at 10:06:03AM +0100, Oswald Benedikt wrote:
> 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 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> 
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