Thank you for your good comments. Your points are well taken. You hit
the nail on the head with "As a professional software engineer." The
typical Rivendell user doesn't know all that stuff. The chances are high
that a large percentage of new RD users are new to Linux as well. Those
were the lines I was thinking of.
Thanks Michael, I absolutely agree. User experience (whether it's the jock, the engineer, or the sysadmin) will be the key driver for adoption of the RD platform.
On a related note, I think it's pretty exciting that Rivendell is, at its heart, fusing the old guard of EE-centric radio engineering with CE/CS-centric software development. We're all aware that the art and science of radio have fallen on hard times, and that we have to do more with less. To me, Rivendell, especially because of its open source nature, is a perfect bridge. At the Stanford station I'm currently heavily volunteering at, it's hard to get students excited about radio engineering when no student owns any sort of alarm clock radio, or any radio at all. 50 years ago you had freshmen banging down the door to the station, wanting to get involved. These were kind of kids who had been stringing up crystal radios and getting ham licenses because it was something to do. Instead I'm faced with folks who don't have (or want) an appreciation for analog equipment, for better or for worse. They don't see any career path for radio, or at least any exciting career path. I can't and won't force them, but I can offer up interesting (to them) challenges around things like streaming and codecs, IP uplinks/QoS/network engineering, software development, system administration and newer media things like podcasting and blogging. The open source community is this decade's collecting grounds for the hobbyist spirit of youth, so I'm glad Rivendell has ventured into this territory!
Perhaps one of my kids will read this message in our future mailing list archive :-D and call me out on it, but until then I am thinking there's lots of stuff here for them to explore, by bootstrapping an install of Rivendell, acquiring some content, and then wiring audio and IO into our transmission chain (time to get another stereo switcher, it seems!) If they want to do more, I'll set them up with their own development sandboxes and do code reviews for them before they submit patches to the dev team.
I look forward to working with you all more in the future :) In the meantime, howdy!
-Andrew Widdowson
KZSU Engineering