No need for the QtOnPi community?

[abishur]

The fact is that another week went by and we didn't get any communication from any channel (including our direct requests via email).

Did you miss Obart's post just a little up the page saying that Liz and Eben were away on Holiday? It's a little hard to respond to an issue like this when you're not around. Now they have to work through all the back log, but they'll get to you in turn

[eben]

A quick update on where we're at with fulfillment of the QtOnPi units:

We are in the process of collating the 400-odd emails to the qtonpi email alias, and verifying them against the voucher list. Element14 have kindly agreed to handle fulfillment for us; we will pass the collated list to them in the next few days, and expect them to have shipped all units by the end of June.

Thanks to the Qt community for your continued patience. We know it's been a long wait, but we hope you'll find it to have been worth it.

Great! Thank you very much for the update!

Klaus

PS: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dyx4v1QFzhQ

By the way, yesterday I talked to my company partner and we decided to not do any port of our QT-based stuff to the R-Pi because of all the delay and so on. Just wanted to write an email today, to get myself erased from the Qt-on-Pi community, when I saw Eben's post. Hmm, came in the last minute for me I mean, not that I take myself so seriously that I think that is so important, but I am just saying..

[jamesh]

By the way, yesterday I talked to my company partner and we decided to not do any port of our QT-based stuff to the R-Pi because of all the delay and so on. Just wanted to write an email today, to get myself erased from the Qt-on-Pi community, when I saw Eben's post. Hmm, came in the last minute for me I mean, not that I take myself so seriously that I think that is so important, but I am just saying..

On the other hand, you obviously do take yourself seriously, or you wouldn't have posted the above!

You are still getting your Pi's ahead of a lot of people who are going to have to pay for them, and who have been in the queue longer than you have. Please consider that.

By the way, yesterday I talked to my company partner and we decided to not do any port of our QT-based stuff to the R-Pi because of all the delay and so on. Just wanted to write an email today, to get myself erased from the Qt-on-Pi community, when I saw Eben's post. Hmm, came in the last minute for me I mean, not that I take myself so seriously that I think that is so important, but I am just saying..

On the other hand, you obviously do take yourself seriously, or you wouldn't have posted the above!

You are still getting your Pi's ahead of a lot of people who are going to have to pay for them, and who have been in the queue longer than you have. Please consider that.

That's a bit harsh imo. Testing / development isn't a junket - it's work and those people who haven't got their Pi yet may well end up benefitting from it.

Having done a bit of beta testing and patch writing for new software I can say that's it's not about the free lunch (although ending up with a nfr copy obviously helps!) and anyone who treats it simply as a feebie tends to get found out pretty quickly.

Thanks for the update Eben.

Hi Eben,

Thank you for taking the time to update us on the deliveries of the QtOnPi boards. I've circulated your message to the QtOnPi mailing list so that those who haven't looked here are now in the loop. Hopefully we won't have to wait patiently for much longer!

Thanks!

A quick update on where we're at with fulfillment of the QtOnPi units:

We are in the process of collating the 400-odd emails to the qtonpi email alias, and verifying them against the voucher list. Element14 have kindly agreed to handle fulfillment for us; we will pass the collated list to them in the next few days, and expect them to have shipped all units by the end of June.

Thanks to the Qt community for your continued patience. We know it's been a long wait, but we hope you'll find it to have been worth it.

Hi Eben,

Thank you for the update, but as there has been a long delay between the emails which people has already sent to you with the shipping addresses, there might be some people who have already moved to a new location, which means that they might not receive the boards at all.

So how are you going to handle this possible scenario?
Will you send a confirmation email to which those people can react and request a delivery address change?

I think that I know at least two persons, but as there are ~400 recipients there are surely a lot more.


Cheers,
Juhapekka

Thanks to the Qt community for your continued patience. We know it's been a long wait, but we hope you'll find it to have been worth it.

Hi Eben,

I guess you know that when we were promised to get the boards from the initial 10k batch everybody was excited and very keen to hop on the raspberry pi train. Now it seems that almost all of us did not order from the Element14/RS, thus making this kind of a bit lame thing.

As you did not comment anything on the question in the first post, I have to ask these:
- What is the need for the QtOnPi community from your point of view?
- What do you expect from the community and from its members?
- Why should we provide a sort of free open source labor for your product?

Or is the answer really that RPi foundation does not actually care that much about open source work for the hardware, you just provide this hardware and do the PR around the hardware.

And I do apologize that I have to ask these questions, but there is no first 10k initial batch to motivate me anymore, so it would be great to have some other reason why to work on this in high priority.


Cheers,
Juhapekka

And I do apologize that I have to ask these questions, but there is no first 10k initial batch to motivate me anymore, so it would be great to have some other reason why to work on this in high priority.

That sounds a bit harsh, but it is actually a good question that Juhapekka asked. Is the R-Pi a platform that is ready for professional development? I mean, I think in many cases the border is thin between hobby project, open-source project and professional work. All of these can end up in making money or also can end up "just" being a nice community effort with no direct profit for anyone involved. And in the end it is not all about money, but also about learning, contributing, fun etc.

But, as a developer who is in the unfortunate situation that I have to turn around every penny (those who have started up a company know what I am talking about), even developing stuff for an "education / hobby etc." platform like the R-Pi has to have some chance for being a support at some point. I mean you know it, there are so many new platforms out there, some many new opportunities, that you could start diving into a whole new super-interesting field every day. But you can't, because time is limited. So you have to look for the good opportunities that have a potential to be sustainable.

The R-Pi looks like a great opportunity and that is I think also a reason, why many people of the Qt-on-Pi community have signed up. But, the whole project also is, at least by me, looked at a little bit carefully (given all the hype), because delays like the one we are experiencing now, are from an objective standpoint not a very good sign for sustained support etc. in the future. And that is why Juhapekka, me and others are so nervous, because we see a great opportunity and we would be sad if it didn't work out. And (@jamesh), it is not because we would like to receive our "freebees" earlier than anyone else.

Sorry for the long off-topic talk..

Klaus

By the way, yesterday I talked to my company partner and we decided to not do any port of our QT-based stuff to the R-Pi because of all the delay and so on. Just wanted to write an email today, to get myself erased from the Qt-on-Pi community, when I saw Eben's post. Hmm, came in the last minute for me I mean, not that I take myself so seriously that I think that is so important, but I am just saying..

On the other hand, you obviously do take yourself seriously, or you wouldn't have posted the above!

You are still getting your Pi's ahead of a lot of people who are going to have to pay for them, and who have been in the queue longer than you have. Please consider that.

The main point is that a professional software engineering costs around 150-200e per hour. The device which we are speaking of, does not cost anything (even if you buy it). Personally I want to know that when I am giving my time as a freebie, that there is somebody who actually values the commits. And if there is no need, then there are a lot of other projects who could use the help on fixing bugs etc.

First of all thank you Eben for the update. Then I'd also like answers to the questions jppiiroinen posted. However from my point of view the Raspberry Pi is clearly not ready for mainstream commercial use now, but it will eventually be distributed in large volumes at least to a particular kind of audience. The motivation now should probably be to play with an awesome device and share the results with a growing community. If you want certainty of reaching a particular market owning devices in any specific way compatible with the current hardware version of the board, I'd guess it's way too early.

You shouldn't expect anything at all from the foundation since it's a non-profit busy with lots of other stuff. For now it's up to the QtOnPi community to create useful software and spread the word. Remember this is an initiative from Nokia, not the foundation.

It doesn't seem to me that the QtOnPi community is valued differently than any other group of 400 future board owners, but that shouldn't discourage you. Compare it to Maemo development. Nokia gave out a lot of free devices, it's fun to develop for it so many people did, but now you can't buy a new device running that software unmodified. I think it was still worth it, and yet the Raspberry Pi can only do better as a long term available hardware platform.

You shouldn't expect anything at all from the foundation since it's a non-profit busy with lots of other stuff. For now it's up to the QtOnPi community to create useful software and spread the word. Remember this is an initiative from Nokia, not the foundation.

I think that my main frustration comes from that I truly misunderstood that RPi Foundation would like to offer means to develop the first showcase projects for their hardware using QtOnPi and help us to "create useful software and spread the word". After awhile it started to feel like that the Nokia and ICS were eating too much of the negative impact in the qtonpi mailinglist as nothing happened and we seemed to be lost in the /dev/null, so I had to start to ask questions to clarify to myself the whole thing.

And it really is not my thing to be the douche who complains out in the public, but it seemed that there was no private message means to ask things from the RPi (or give any feedback in private). And that even brought more frustration as I truly like the RPi and I had high expectations on how,why and when we could get things done. And by totally ignoring the questions what I asked was a nice plus as well.

I do understand that there are a tons of things to be done in a non-profit organisation, but all what they should have done is to:
a) ask help, or just
b) inform us that we have been heard (and not ignored)

For example, I rather hear somebody saying "we are busy, it will take several weeks to process the emails" than just stating "yes we can" and doing nothing or like in this case "".

It doesn't seem to me that the QtOnPi community is valued differently than any other group of 400 future board owners, but that shouldn't discourage you. Compare it to Maemo development. Nokia gave out a lot of free devices, it's fun to develop for it so many people did, but now you can't buy a new device running that software unmodified. I think it was still worth it, and yet the Raspberry Pi can only do better as a long term available hardware platform.

Wise words indeed. And I would not complain if I would not be eager to receive the hardware and start playing with Qt5 on it. Now it just seems that there are those ~400 people and most of them does not seem to care anymore, which were at first as eager as I was or even more. So partially all the heavy lifting of the stones (by Nokia and ICS) to get all the geeks together might have gone waste in this.