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steeve
Up and Coming
April 1, 2013

Open sourcing the SDK on Github

Hey Oculus team!

First, thank you guys for everything. I followed this project since Palmer sent his prototype to Carmack. And now that I got my devkit delivered last Friday, what a journey. It works great, great quality, I'm very very pleased!

After checking out the SDK, to my surprise, I found there is some code for Mac/Linux! Awesome. So this afternoon I took upon myself to make it build on Mac. I managed to build it, but when I launched a simple OVR program, it crashed (while enumerating the displays btw). No big deal, it's not ready I know, no worries.

So I was about to open an issue on Github and maybe open a pull request, when I remembered: it's not distributed via Github. Crap, because I think it should. I mean, I know you have to be a registered developer to download it, but the source is out, so you might as well let us help you!

Hope you'll like the idea.

    4 replies

    ganzuul
    Up and Coming
    April 1, 2013
    Github has a lot going for it, and working with git is a breeze.

    Your code is very pretty, Oculus. Don't be afraid to show it! ;)
    Jimi
    Participant
    April 5, 2013
    From my understanding, there is nothing stopping any developers from hosting a mirror of the code on Github. However, I believe the thing you're after is issue tracking in general. It doesn't appear that Oculus has any issue-tracking system set up for the SDK (besides maybe this forum). Github would force Oculus to switch to Git if they weren't already using it for version control, however there are many independent issue-tracking systems available that wouldn't require any changes to version control. Valve uses Github only for issue-tracking for Steam for Linux. It's worked great for them so far. Oculus Team, this is the next step in maturing your SDK and managing the feedback from your community. A forum just isn't the best medium.
    Capyvara
    Up and Coming
    July 4, 2013
    Bump!

    Some reasons for Oculus to also host the SDK's on github or bitbucket:

    • The community can contribute, providing fixes and improvements

    • Allow people to browse/link to the code online

    • The SDK will appear on github anyways, people will add it for personal projects, having an official source will reduce chaos and allow people to keep better tracking of the changes

    • Bigger companies does that, example: Valve, ID and Unity keeps their open sources components on github

    • Even if they don't use Git internally (I suspect they use Perforce), it's easy to set up a workflow to drop the releases to Git

    • Optionally use the issue tracker (or they could add one to this site, since the Wiki is already here), a forum is not a replacement for a tracker


    I know Oculus is looking for keeping the things centralised here, but nothing prevents for an extra channel of distribution.
    jherico
    Inspiring
    July 4, 2013
    I've already created a GitHub mirror of the SDK here: https://github.com/jherico/OculusSDK

    It's master branch tracks the official SDK version. Feel free to open issues there. Granted, it's not an official repository, but the code is made available under the SDK license which means it's all owned by OVR, so they'll be free to take anything from it they want to.
    Brad Davis - Developer for High Fidelity Co-author of Oculus Rift in Action
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