Started in another thread I would like to make a proposal for community developed updates for our Vs.
Current Situation (Contains many assumptions!)
As far as I can tell, most development of features for the V will go from community to eve and then to an [emdoor] engineer who needs to implement for example better palm recognition. Or in case of the keyboard, it goes from community to eve [to emdoor] to keyboard vendor. =optional
These are just assumptions, since I think that development is done at the manufacturer of the part not at eve directly.
Current Procedure
Someone in the community has an idea of a new cool function and tries to explain that in the community. Eve acknowledges that and gives the information [to emdoor which give it] to the keyboard vendor. They develop a firmware update test it and give it to eve. Eve tests it and publishes it for the community. When somewhere a misinterpretation happens, the process needs to be redone and is huge and costly, since all of that needs to be covered by eve.
Better solution
Official Keyboard firmware is open source (risk of copies, but can be reduced through a license). The improvement idea comes from the community. Community developers develop a test-update in his/her free time (mostly this will be very small things, but can even be a whole open-source program) and send the improved software directly to the one who originally had the idea. They can test it together and confirm the correct/intended behavior (= Alpha Test). Then a public Beta can be published for the community and bugs can be smashed and then the team decides if they will make that feature official for all Vs or if it only stays an unofficial tweak.
To tackle the concern that some users could install unofficial updates I would propose to mark the Beta tests and school people that only official software is supported.
Having the official software in an automatic installer and on the eve-tech website and the custom ones in the community would be best.
I think no one should download unofficial SW from the community without further knowledge and instead use the official website or a tool.
The number of people searching the forums when there is a tool for that should also be smaller imo.
If we can convince the manufacturers to give us, the community [development team], the source code of as many things as possible, we can cancel out more unnecessary intermediate steps and make the development of new functions for the V even cheaper for eve and much faster for us.
@Team to be able to do that, it would be interesting to know which V Software (Firmware) parts can be shared to allow altering for personal preferences and new Tools.
For example, the Keyboard Firmware to create Interfaces for a Configuration Utility. If that cannot be shared we as the Community cannot do the development on our own without the Team/Keyboard manufacturer creating a Keyboard API for us.
Since some things surely will be under NDA, a list of possible parts of the V where the Sourcecode can be shared would be great.
@Community What do you think about the possibility to tinker with your V software yourselves?