A Farewell to StreamToMe
I fixed the bugs but now I had a different problem: customers, lots of them, all wanting features. If they all wanted the same features, there might not be a problem but I quickly learned that media is a deeply personal experience and everyone wants to experience it a different way.
Ever wondered why all the major media player are a weird kitchen-sink of features bolted onto each other? Media players are a product-space where everyone uses a tiny slice of the features but no two users use the same slice of features and the entire space is really, really broad.
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Like an idiot, I scrambled to add as many features as I could. Unfortunately, I ended up with a huge swath of features that I didn’t really use and the app stopped starting to feel like it properly catered to me. For something that started as a personal passion project, I was starting to feel like an dispassionate observer, rather than a passionate participant.
And as the feature set grew, so did a different class of maintenance problems and these were not simple bugs that could be fixed.
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That's sad, even if totally understandable. The point I'm stuck on, did the developer succinctly describe why he didn't open source any of the project? I see allusions to the fact, but seems like that point wasn't really explained well. Maybe I just missed it?
