Hi Doug,
You are probably correct about the one in a hundred, but it's extremely frustrating. Take libusb for example. I'd estimate I spent 20 - 30 hours working on it, possibly more, over a period of several weeks. Now that the port is available, it opens several doors in terms of other software that can be ported & used on OS/2.
I think that something like libusb would mean something only to other developers, who might need it for a project that they are working on. A normal user would have no need for such a thing, by itself. Since you asked for help, those who try to do more than sit back and wait, stepped forward, and did some testing. I must admit that I, for one, did not see any use for it, until you mentioned USB scanners. Whether it will actually turn into something useful, or not, remains to be seen, although initial reports from those who did some USB scanner testing, would seem to be somewhat encouraging. Then, there is the question about how many OS2/eCS users even have a USB scanner. I would bet that there are not a lot. If libusb turns out to be useful for scanners, there may be more, in the future. I for one have an antique Epson ES-1000C SCSI scanner, that doesn't want to work on recent hardware, and SCSI is becoming more of a problem, so I am thinking about getting a new scanner. I expect that it will be USB, when I find something that will likely work. Unfortunately, you usually cannot buy something, and return it just because it won't work with eCS.
I don't *personally* need any of these ports. My desktop OS has been Ubuntu since April 2011. The work I do on OS/2 is purely for a) entertainment and b) because I still have a soft spot for OS/2. I get a lot of satisfaction from getting things working, but in some cases, I put things out there via places like os2world, and based on no feedback - so I don't even know if they're found to be a) useful of b) work they never end up on my site as I don't want to link to things that a) aren't useful or b) don't work, to the possible detriment of other users.
We all appreciate what you do, many just don't bother to say so.
Perhaps you need to split your web site into two parts. 1) with "proven" software, and 2) with "experimental" software. When somebody reports that "experimental" software works, move it to the "proven" area (perhaps three good reports would be better). In fact, three parts, with the third being software support stuff, might make sense.
As for "aren't useful": I admit that I find a lot of what gets ported to be "not useful". I hate to say so, because others obviously find some of it to be useful, and every once in a while, I go looking for something that has been around for a while, that I didn't find useful when it first appeared. Perhaps you need some way for users to request "useful" ports. That would, of course, lead to porting libraries etc. Just picking something, because it sounds like something that people would like, will work sometimes, but spending two weeks on a picture viewer is probably a waste of time, because we already have PMView, which is hard to beat.
At the moment, I have been putting off collecting the information required to try to get Uniaud to work on my new Lenovo ThinkPad L530 system. Version 2.02.01, produced by DAZAR1, creates sound, but it is not right. Older versions won't even load. Now that David A. has got the Realtek Multimac driver working with it, I should get on with reporting the Uniaud problem, but I must admit that sound, on a laptop, is not a high priority for me.
If you are looking for something to do (yeah, right), Have a look at
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Thinkpad-acpi. There is some indication that the program might enable WiFi radios on ThinkPad models where GENMAC/XWLAN won't do it. It has a number of other "interesting" features as well.
