1. How do you pass on skills and knowledge to the next generation of developers?
They get it by themselves by reading and posting in the forum and by reading the source. It's not necessary to bait developers. Those who find the project interesting will join by own motivation.
We are very lucky that most new camera releases seem to have found developers interested in porting CHDK, but Canon will keep producing new models and every developer will eventually find other more urgent things to do than port CHDK to a yet another camera!
It's already the case that a developer can give only slight support to porting a camera he doesn't own. So each new model requires someone who is (more-or-less) skilled in programming.
2. Where do you think CHDK development will stop - or at what point will developers lose interest in CHDK and move on to other challenges?
This doesn't matter for CHDK as a project. Even if every person who's working on it right now would walk away and start a life without technology, new people would find the project and continue to work on it. It would only slow down and eventually stop if no more devices that execute foreign program code are built.
In future, I suppose it would be possible to duplicate everything in the official Canon SDK, but that would displease Canon and the commercial developers who make money out of software.
I read only few things about the canon SDK (mainly that my model is not supported
) and I really wonder if there is someone who writes commercial software for digital cameras. I can imagine situations where the canon SDK would be used, like very specific appliances as part of a larger project. Even though those might be done using CHDK, the project management wants to have someone to blame if it doesn't work (which doesn't change the fact of the failure, but that's manager-thinking, I guess
). So there's no competition between CHDK and the official SDK.
Cheers.
