On releasing Libaudioverse 0.9

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Austin Hicks

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Sep 14, 2016, 4:48:49 PM9/14/16
to libaud...@camlorn.net
Hi,

I've had some interest in when 0.9 will happen lately, so here's
what's going on:


I've been drawn into some work on the Rust compiler. I currently
have a large pull request that should be merged soon, hopefully in the
next few days. In the middle of this, I was asked to be on the
development team of Dictation Bridge, specifically in the context of
Jaws scripting. For anyone on here who isn't familiar with that, it's a
project to integrate dictation solutions with screen readers, and it's
important; anyone needing both pieces of technology currently has to pay
a great deal, but Dictation Bridge is going to be free. At the moment
these projects are higher priority: the Rust thing will allow me to have
meaningful production code on literally thousands of machines while also
being interesting and challenging; the Dictation Bridge work is
worthwhile and something for which I will be payed. Once these projects
are out of the way, I will be returning to Libaudioverse 0.9 release plans.


I've been giving some thought to the bindings generator. I was
going to leave off cleaning it up until after 0.9, but I no longer think
this is feasible. The most important language for games by far is C++,
but we can't currently do C++ bindings. There are a huge number of
people whose exposure to Libaudioverse will be limited only to the 0.9
announcement, and a good number of them who might otherwise keep
following it won't if they see that C++ isn't a thing. I could make up
the difference, later, but I have to do this no matter what and now
comes with a potentially big advantage. The C++ bindings don't need to
be super amazing and stable, but they do need to be at least alpha quality.


Unless something happens to change my mind, we won't have a CLA. I
could do it, but it's going to add permanent administrative overhead on
everything I do. I can't delegate this to someone else. Dealing with
it at this stage takes all the fun out of Libaudioverse and, until and
unless I can fund it, fun is my only reward. Since we are GPL3/MPL2,
the uses of a CLA are limited anyway; the only thing I'm disallowing is
someone buying it from me to make a proprietary fork. This is unlikely
in the extreme. I will be updating contributing.md to reflect this in
the near future. If someone has an idea on how to monetize
Libaudioverse that would need a CLA, now is the time to bring it up; I
can't think of any myself. Licensing encryption falls through because I
worked out how to do it and the closed source parts are about a day of
work (this deserves a blog post, but the public interface will expose
enough that you will know how it works internally, and at that point I
lose). SO far as I can figure, there is nothing else I can sell.


Since I'm now building on Windows 10 and have WSL, the continuous
integration will probably go away. I don't know if this will be before
or after 0.9, but a full build of Libaudioverse is going to start
needing some very odd dependencies as I roll out more language
bindings. Consequently, it's going to be easiest to just use my local
setup for it, with some automation scripts. I doubt this will affect
anyone. The binaries made available via GitHub will remain, but the
Appveyor artifacts for every merge to master will go away.


Finally, I will be starting a Patreon and making donation buttons
available. This isn't launched yet. Doing it is harder than it needs
to be because of my lack of skill at writing and Patreon's annoyingly
inaccessible rich text editor. I do intend to crowdfund in future.
Since both of these things are little effort once they're in place,
however, they're worth doing. I'll send out links via this list and
probably also Twitter once it's done.

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