New campaign soon - Native markdown support in Xiki

[Craig Muth]

I'll be doing another campaign soon, for Xiki saving all your sessions as markdown files that you can reuse. You'll be able to open any markdown file and run the commands in it. I think people will get excited about this and back the campaign, and then I can get some help fixing install bugs etc.

Sorry for having been bad at fixing bugs lately. I only have so many hours I can commit to Xiki at the moment, since the last campaign failed.

I'll probably post this campaign on kickstarter and indigogo and gofundme, and make a patron as well. I'm going to make the beginning of the video be close to https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=bUR_eUVcABg since that's the one people seem to get the most excited about.

Would love to hear ideas about how I can promote the campaign and get it to pass. (I know "fix the install bugs" already :) )

--Craig

[Clark Feusier]

I haven't looked in a while, but unless the codebase is actually opened, I have zero interest in backing your campaigns. 

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[Chaz Straney]

Last commit to master: Nov 16, 2016.

A lot of people gave you a lot of money to work on an open source project. I personally spent 300 bucks on the first kickstarter. Clearly you have no intention of actually, you know, developing the thing out in the open.

Its too bad, really. I'm surprised you have the gall to ask for more money, honestly. I'm really only still subscribed to this list for the schadenfreude. Sorry for the brutality of this reply but I'm hoping it will make you realize, Craig, how much of a cluster@#$% this project has been for anyone backing it.

[Kurt Thams]

Got to agree. Craig: the only way this works is if you push the commits as you go, which has the dual benefits of letting people see that the progress for which they are contributing money, *and* it lets people jump in and help.

Wish you would do this; Xiki is too cool to die on the vine.

- kurt

[Craig Muth]

I could do without the schadenfreude. A lot of money is relative. If you average the hours I've spent and the money I've gotten it would come to well under minimum wage. I could have made 10x more money getting a normal job.

--Craig

[Joseph Fredette]

No one here is enjoying your pain (schadenfreude). We're saying we put money into this at one point or another, and it's been a while since we've seen an ROI. 2016ish by the looks of it. It's true, OSS is often thankless work, but it's not reasonable to ask for people to invest in something and never show results.

[Craig Muth]

He said schadenfreude - you must have missed it. Not sure if many of
you have done crowdfunding campaigns, but the taxes/ks fees/payment
processing fees/rewards costs/expenses of creating the campaign add up
to probably more than you would think.

I released a new version of xiki with a sizable refactor and the new
xsh interface after a ton of work. It was all pushed to github and
announced on this list. It's fair to say I haven't committed in a
while and that there was a bit of a pivot (mostly based on feedback
from backers) but the new version of Xiki I released after the
campaign is pretty great.

--Craig

[Clark Feusier]

Craig,

You responses are disheartening, as it is evident you are focused on arguing about funding and rates. The past backers on this thread have indicated repeatedly that another backing would only happen if you open the codebase and let others pitch in, like a legitimate oss project. Until you do that, your campaigns and explanations for how much it costs to dev Xixi, are irrelevant to previously duped backers. Pointing to 1 massive release push every few years doesn't assuage my worries.

[Craig Muth]

Point taken. This isn't an ideal project for you. I very much appreciate your past support, but I get that I can regrettably expect no further support from you. To recap:

Ideal open source project: Frequent commits on github, and preferably contributions from many users.

Xiki: Infrequent github commits. Commits from one dev.

Let's not lose sight of the overall picture though. What makes a tool awesome is that it does something awesome. Linux would be no less useful to us for Torvalds having slacked off on committing for the first couple years while he got it stable.

I see Xiki as analogous to Docker, where the huge potential for user contribution is in creating containers. It didn't matter much that the core docker codebase didn't get much contribution early on when they were still ironing out how it should work. (Incidentally the docker cli interface is shitty because they were innovating and had to lock it in at some point).

With Xiki the huge potential for contribution will be for markdown files with code snippets. Code snippets that act like little user interfaces for commands. (Also the code snippets can be written in any language.) In the past that was difficult to explain. Now that I'm going to support markdown files instead of xiki's native wiki format (another huge refactor), it has become significantly easier to explain.

Getting that path to contribution to be smooth is critical to Xiki. When I was more rigorous about committing in the past, people were submitting pull requests for ruby classes that made kind of ok interfaces but not great ones, that I would then have to decide whether to add to the Xiki repo. The homebrew model of contribution wasn't working for Xiki.

For those whose tolerance I've yet to exceed, markdown support will be what the next campaign will focus on. Opening any markdown file and running the commands in it, right from your command prompt. Auto-saving all your sessions as markdown files so you can reopen and reuse them. Letting users make markdown files with their favorite command examples, and even little user interfaces, that will be easily accessible right under commands. And the ability to share those markdown files so other users can search for them right from their command prompt.

--Craig

[Tim Uckun]

FYI. The install script doesn't work so you might want to get that taken care of before you start your fundraising campaign.

Also this would be a really great spacemacs layer.