Currently vuos backend (excluding vuo editor app) is published as a timed release on GitHub.
In the light of submissions being possible by other talented individuals (myself not included) it would be great to open up the engine development and allow contributions to be easily made over GitHub.
I do not believe this will have a negative effect on vuo sales because:
no editor
still have to build
newest revision would by definition be unstable so not ready for prime time use
no access to pro nodes unless paying
So I can only see positives for team vuo to allow realtime interactive development.
The only downside I could imagine is if someone coded a front end that rivaled vuo-editor.app. But that could already happen now theoretically with the timed release? So maybe have more un-published node sets: paid nodes & paid pro nodes?
We (the Vuo team) gave this a lot of thought, and realized that there would be some significant difficulties involved.
It would take time to switch over our repository from Subversion to Git. In addition to the repo itself, there’s stuff built around it such as our Jenkins build server.
It would be a big and kind of scary change to switch from a private repo to a public one. Before making a release public, we check things like: have we properly attributed and included licenses for all 3rd-party libraries? have we accidentally opened up any ways to bypass payment? If every commit were public on GitHub, there’d be much more risk of accidentally committing something that could get us into trouble such as legal issues.
So far, the code contributions we’ve gotten from you and others have all been new nodes. For that use case, I think it’s actually an easier workflow to build against the SDK than to have to set up the entire Vuo source code (esp. if it’s bleeding-edge) and get it to build before you can do anything.
If sometime in the future we’re getting a larger amount of code contributions, especially patches to existing code, enough to justify the amount of effort this feature request would take, we’ll revisit it. For now, we’re going to table it.
Starting with Vuo 2.0, we’ll be publishing the full source code for each Vuo CE release — including the editor source and without the 1-year delay — at https://github.com/vuo
Because of the issues I mentioned above, in between releases the Vuo team will continue to develop in a private repository. However, we’ll be in a much better position to accept pull requests since our private repo will be more in line with the public one.