servonk VS sucks

Servo has always been easy to embed. Basically the host needs to provide a GL surface and input events, and gets some callbacks from Servo.

Maybe I should revive the Gonk port[0]...

[0] https://github.com/fabricedesre/servonk/

Servo produced a very fast CSS rules matching engine now used in Firefox (see https://nolanlawson.com/2022/06/22/style-scoping-versus-shad...), and WebRender which underpins Gecko's rendering. That's not nothing.

About embedding Servo, I have some experience around that (https://github.com/fabricedesre/servonk/) and it's been easy to embed: you just need to provide a GL surface and hook up your input events into their event loop. Clearly there were not zero integration points, and a some other examples exist (like https://github.com/paulrouget/servoshell).

This is correct, and it's why most open-source software will never have much in the way of users:

> They're written from the perspective of the developers

And I get it. A few years back I had an open-source project [1] get users and it was terrible. What had previously been a fun technical exercise became a pain in the ass that felt a lot like actual work. I was relieved when my hardware broke and I had an excuse to archive the project.

But that does create a huge gap that mostly gets filled by commercial interests.

[1] https://github.com/wpietri/sucks

It seems like you haven't quite got the concept of open source. If everybody consumes and nobody contributes, how long will that last?

A while back I bought a cheap robot vacuum. Their scheduling feature didn't meet my needs, so I reverse-engineered the protocol and open-sourced a cron-friendly CLI tool and a library so people could do other things with it: https://github.com/wpietri/sucks

Honestly, this was a mistake on my part. It was a demanding audience of home-automation hobbyists mostly without programming skills. The company was thoroughly unhelpful. When my vacuum finally broke, I was relieved, as I had a good excuse for trying to hand off the project. Nobody stepped up, so I shut it down. I just ran out of interest in doing free work to support a company worth billions.

I really admire the community spirit of open source But it's not sustainable if companies making their money off it keep depending on the niceness and generosity of others without giving back enough to keep them happy, healthy, productive people.

I reverse-engineered the comms for my cheap Ecovacs robot vacuum and was surprised to discover that, like some angsty teen, it spent all day hanging out in an XMPP chatroom waiting for somebody to talk to it: https://github.com/wpietri/sucks/blob/master/developing.md