Hi,

Good question about Rivendell vs. LiveSupport. A little bit of background
might be helpful based on our experience with another free and open source
project we work on, the Campsite content management system.

When CAMP started work on Campsite in 1999, there were very few open source
content management systems available. Today, there are several very good
ones available in the open source community, each with different software
architectures, feature sets and user constituencies.

They are all valid, and there is no 'best' CMS, only the best one for a
particular need at a particular time.

I believe the same is true when trying to compare Rivendell and
LiveSupport. The Rivendell team deserve great respect for the work they've
done on their system, which indeed is robust and has a number of powerful
features.

In fact, if you compare Rivendell today and LiveSupport today, Rivendell
wins hands down in terms of the feature list. Things like a pad for jingle
samples that can be added to the mix, support for high-end audio cards, and
some pretty sophisticated logging features and functions are excellent. But
we're gaining on 'em.

There are already some areas where LiveSupport has features Rivendell does
not:

- Usability. LiveSupport has had a team of designers from the Parsons
School of Design working on making it as user-friendly as possible

- Web interface. Using LiveSupport's web interface, you can manage a
station from anywhere on the Internet

-Language localization. LiveSupport is really easy to translate into other
languages

- ScratchPad. A list of the files you've recently worked with that works
like a clipboard on steroids.

I may be wrong, but LiveSupport's playlist handling looks different than
Rivendell's, in that LiveSupport supports recursive playlists (that is,
playlists inside playlists, where for example a block of ads from one ad
agency is one playlist, a block of ads from another agency is another
playlist, a DJ's show is a playlist, and a block of shows is a playlist).
Playlists can be played in Live Mode, or they can be scheduled for
automatic broadcast.

The two systems are also very different in technical architecture.
LiveSupport system components use XML-RPC to communicate with each other,
meaning that a volunteer user could decide to make a Mac OS X or Windows
version of the LiveSupport Studio program, and not have to be bound by the
rest of the system components ? they could run on separate computers, on
separate operating systems or even be written in separate programming
languages and the whole system will work.

In the future, other program components can ? and will ? take advantage of
this architecture to allow for much faster feature development. Again, as
far as I can tell, Rivendell is all written in C++. That's great in terms
of reliability and speed, but is going to be difficult in terms of making
changes in the code, because in our experience, open source C++ developers
are harder to come by.

We intentionally wrote as much of the backend as possible - the
StorageServer, Authorization Library and HTML User Interface - in PHP, so
that they can be easily altered to meet individual stations' needs using
available programmer talent ? the PHP language being one of the widest-used
in the world. We're betting on 'hackability' as a way to ensure the
project's popularity into the future.

Another major difference between the two systems involves the program
exchange and portal functionalities that will be released as LiveSupport
Network. With Network, which is the last major component in this release
cycle and coming later this summer, stations will be able to share their
shows with other LiveSupport stations on their Network in a user-friendly
manner. The shared programs can be made available to other stations only,
or to the general public, along the lines of PRX.org.

Again, 'nuff respect to Rivendell. They've done a great job, and one only
appreciates the scale of their efforts when one goes deep into their
system. We're doing a different job, though, and the beauty of open source
projects is that you're not tied to one option.

I'll send up-to-date screenshots of LiveSupport Studio in another mail, and
also hope StorageServer developer Tomas Hlava will jump in to explain how
that component works.

Hope this clarifies the situation a bit,

douglas

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