Engine OS Open Source?

Well here is a thought: since Denon makes its money selling hardware anyway, did the tech guys at Denon ever consider making Engine OS open source?

That way we could all contribute at making the OS even better than it currently is. It could significantly speed up the dev process and I can imagine this would be a huge leap forward in the DJ community.

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I think personally that the way with plugins that can be written by the community is the better way.

Otherwise you can end up with Denon players that crash on a event or something else. That might hurt the brand / reliability of the product more than it gains from the contribution.

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I’m not saying that contribution should be unchecked/unverified before it ends up in the firmware. For that code reviews and proper QA were invented :slight_smile:

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I think there’s a topic or Votable suggestion form for this thought already.

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Pretty sure they can’t because the audio analysing part of their platform cannot be open sourced.

if that’s the case, they could always provide that part in a separate binary library and leave the rest open source.

well it’s already seperately packaged, on PRIME software there’s a executable called OfflineAnalyzer.exe. The rest of the app use Qt tookit. I’m pretty sure it’s also used for Engine OS since Qt is also made for embedded devices.

If you go on their web site and choose an open source license, lots of options get disabled and I’m pretty sure the their Commercial License prevent sharing the code.

I would love being able to fork / modify / study Engine PRIME with open source but I my expectation on this are pretty low. The only audio’ish company I heard releasing source code was Novation, which they released the source code for some of their midi controllers.

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I’m with you on this one. Closed source is soooo 2000’s :slight_smile: I’d love to help them out with fixing things and implementing new awesome features.

Just imagine the amount of positive feedback Denon would get if they open sourced this. Not to mention the amount of extra coders; as I’m sure a pretty big share of the middle aged DJs out there, myself included, is well versed in coding.

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No, it’s not. 90% of software development is closed source, particularly commercial/enterprise development. That statement is just factually incorrect.

Libraries and frameworks are open-source yes, whole programs/web apps/commercial software no. And there are lots of good reasons for keeping it closed source, just as there are good reasons for open sourcing at least parts of it.

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Yea!

I recently made feature request for it. Vote it up :slightly_smiling_face:

Instead of open source the whole thing, they could document the Engine OS database format, which would enable third party software to export for their devices.

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Edit: Nvm, looks like the page was deleted

Edit 2: Found it again! Engine Library Format · mixxxdj/mixxx Wiki · GitHub

Yeah I consulted it a lot when coding my own sync tool, but it’s also missing a lot of details. For example, how external databases ID function, how file path are supposed to be written or how crates / playlist are supposed to be stored.

There is a whole lot of (convoluted) logic associated with managing multiple databases files which can break.

Hope you did notice the smile after my comment :slight_smile: But there obviously was a bit of truth to it. As opposed to say 20 years ago, the open source community gained an enormous momentum. Back in the day almost everything was closed source. And now even programs from browsers to entire IDEs like Visual Studio Code are all open sourced. I’ve seen entire game engines turn open source, whereas this was never possible in the old days where everyone wanted to keep everything for himself, forcing everyone else to reinvent the wheel over and over again.

Keeping everything closed, can be less secure, more error prone and also has the risk that the development is slow. If some manager decides that a dev team can better used somewhere else, the end-user will bite the dust, as he will never get any new updates or they will be delivered excruciatingly slow.

In my opinion, making it open source has a huge potential in generating more customers if you have an entire dedicated community focused on making the best DJ tool out there, not just a small team at Denon.

Sure, I understand that company secrets probably need to stay that way. But a lot of other things could be opened up. At least through some SDK, as some mentioned here as well.

You can contribute to that page. I did, when I had to fill in some blanks…

As I said in my original post, libraries and frameworks it makes sense to open source. Game Engines come under this category. They are not in of themselves a functioning product but need to be used by other programs in order to function.

Open-sourcing can also make things less secure, moot point.

As above, I’d argue open sourcing can introduce more errors as you have hobbyist developers who may not understand the full scope of the changes they are making, and don’t have the entire project setup in their head.

Code approval processes can make open sourcing consume more time than closed source development.

Too many cooks can spoil the broth.

I haven’t even gone down the route of other pitfalls of open-sourcing such as feature roadmaps and implementations being easily available to competitors etc.

I think it is important that we both are here trying to improve this platform. I’m not here to have a full blown discussion about advantages vs disadvantages in general. I think Open Source can greatly help with this platform. You might be thinking otherwise. It’s okay to disagree :slight_smile:

In products that aren’t in the public eye, I’d think that open sourcing might be viable. Not the case for DJ equipment though. Some hacked firmware could bring a set to an abrupt end, with well-known logos in the forefront of everyone’s mind, as they move onto the next bar, club, stream, on-line video etc

At least, this time, Denon have used a standard SQL database for their library management, meaning almost anyone and everyone can have a go. Sure, the earliest conversion utilities were an utter mess, but Rekordcloud and the recent ENJINN look a thousand times better.

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So can feature requests :wink:

Open source is mostly for kickstarting or eol isn’t it? And for the successful ones, one must purchase add ons or plugins to get the full experience.