by ethan3391 » Tue Jul 20, 2010 1:08 am
It has the potential to be the greatest flight simulator of any type, and is probably the best in the open source/free ware world, but it needs stabilizing to make it more user friendly. It is such a complex project that it is hard to pinpoint one main cause of instability. By having FlightGear in the Google Summer of Code the standards could be brought up to a higher level, and the experience of those new to the open source world would be greater.
It can show, to a larger crowd than most, what the open source community can do when motivated. Perhaps more so than picture editors and other obscure projects like that. Thanks to Microsoft Flight Simulator, the flight simulation world has a rather large following while most of the mentoring organizations in GSoC fall into niche markets. Not many people go searching for tank battle games, for instance, or C++ compiling software, but flight simulators are quite popular, and the likelihood of someone looking for a free one is high.
[EDIT] On second thought, that part about stability, might be better left out.
[EDIT2] The second paragraph could replace the first, and a replacement for the second could go something like this;
FlightGear has an unprecedented potential for attractiveness to new users due to its versatility and usability on multiple platforms. It is made to be used on as wide a variety of operating systems as possible. Microsoft Flight Simulator and many others have the drawback of not including operating systems like Linux and OpenBSD, whereas FG is made to be compatible with these, the usual Mac and Windows OS's, as well as even lesser known operating systems. Therefore, it has the ability to be used by a much larger audience.
What one fool can do, another can. (simian proverb published in the book, Calculus Made Easy by, Silvanus P. Thompson)