[Ovmsdev] V3 CAN frames missing last four data bytes

[Collin Kidder]

On Fri, Oct 27, 2017 at 6:29 AM, Tom Parker <tom at carrott.org> wrote:
>
> DBC is being used by comma.ai see https://github.com/commaai/opendbc

That's actually one of the reasons I brought up DBC. You can
essentially use all of their signals definitions for free if you use
DBC or KCD. So, that's a big jump start in device support. It's very
advantageous if we all can use as much of each other's work as
possible.

> I'm not sure why so many open source can bus efforts have been abandoned
> before they're fully done.

Lots of reasons.

One, because nobody is holding their feet to the flames (so to speak).
When a developer is being paid at a commercial company there is
pressure to produce a "finished" product because you can't really sell
vaporware (at least you shouldn't). A lot of open source projects
started out as something that somebody needed to do what they wanted
to do. Once that project gets to the point that it does what they
needed there is no pressure left. It does what they needed. So, they
quit. They find some other thing they need and they start on that.
This leaves tens of thousands of open source project scattered
everywhere that kind of do what the original developer wanted to do
before they got bored or got to the point where it wasn't fun or where
it did what they needed. I can speak to this directly. I have lots of
open source projects on my github account. Some haven't been worked on
in years. There was an idea, that idea got worked on, the idea was
abandoned, so was the project. The source lingers on. Also, I've
experienced a lull in development too. With SavvyCAN I wrote it so
that I could do some reverse engineering (following the theme of open
source projects that scratch the developer's itch). At a certain point
I was nearly the only one using it and so once it worked for me it
kind of stagnated a bit. I was the only developer, one of like 3-4
users. It just never seemed too important to make it work for a wide
range of people or to document it. It could easily have fallen into
the open source hole and been stagnant forever. But, it ended up
getting popular recently for a number of reasons and now the pressure
is on to keep going.

So, really, I think the number one problem is lack of an audience. If
no one is using your work it's easy to get discouraged/disinterested
and just go on to something else.