kowalski:
The existing LiquidCrystal library is far from perfect but it is a lot better than the one it replaced several years ago. When the new version was introduced I pointed out some of its remaining problems to both the author (Lady Ada of Adafruit) and to the Arduino people by means of the earlier forum. As you can see nothing has been corrected.
I think this shows one of the interesting problems with open-source software for the Arduino. It seems to be no problems at all raising money to fund yet-another-arduino-clone-board on Kickstarter but software - no way. No body seems interested in financing for instance a new LCD library. To do that you have to find a hardware tweak and sell an add-on. As Adafruit has gone commercial they really can't put X1000 dollar behind doing an update of the library. And companies of that scale can not rely on hobby efforts or allowing anybody to update. That could generate too much bad-will and too many non-billable service request hours.
Most of the Arduino libraries are developed by non-professionals that simply want to share. This is great! But these libraries do not mature and become true open-source class as for instance gcc, Eclipse, etc. There is a lot of infra-structure missing. It would be nice to see the Arduino team driving the next step in the software development - true component oriented software for the Arduino, e.g. a foundation for device drivers and hardware integration. Right now it is really difficult to use the hardware resource available on an Arduino Mega or Due without a better programming paradigm and component interfaces.
The Arduino hardware (or any other hardware) is nothing without software and an effective software development environment/software components. It seems like earnings on Arduino hardware is used to develop new hardware but very seldom used on developing new software components.
Cheers!
I agree. It seems like software should be free and needs no sponsoring like hardware.
Jantje