Craig wrote:As MapTool is a hobby/spare time project where no one is getting paid to work on it and the team is smallish its unfortunately susceptible to people getting too busy / personal lives getting messed up etc. This part of your post is correct.
I think this is fairly well understood amoung most MT users. But, when MT goes into these "dormant" stages the forums start seeing question about whether or not it's "Dead"... and it creates opportunities for forks to get stronger footholds. Mote would most certainly never have happened without MT having been in the state that it was.
There was no resistance offered.
Well, I won't dredge up old threads... but there was certainly some resistance offered in the form of an amorphous "feature lock". A lock that extended far past what it was ever intended to. The lock was, on occasion, lifted for one thing or another... but there was certainly "resistance" to any major changes because so much was supposed to be "coming soon" in a future 1.4.
Lee kept popping up in the forums, "I have a fix for this" or "I added that" but never sent any patch to be applied, he also didn't respond to queries or offers of help to integrate them. We even offered to let him take over the 1.3 builds deciding what goes into them and when to release them. He was more interested in holding on to stuff (some which he had said he had completed) for his kickstarter. Don't get me wrong the license at the time allowed him to do this he had no obligation to submit them or provide the code to anyone, but it provides background for the way I see things.
I do remember that he was offered a larger role in 1.3... and I can't say I was privy to everything that went on before that became public... but it seemed like it happened after he'd set his mind on Mote. Regardless, it certainly seemed like things were fracturing at that point.
This is correct we decided not to back it -- and I will get into why soon -- we even had discussions about should we stop posts about it in the forums and decided not to as it might be taken as a case of sour grapes and cause a lot of unwanted noise and/or acrimony in the forums.
Yeah, it was a very weird vibe at the time.
Comment about Mote from the core was pretty non-existent... and that was a little hard to read because it could have been disapproval... indifference... disconnection... dispassion... etc.
Some time before Lee started the kickstarter (around the time he announced he was going to do so) we approached him and offered to support him with it as long as he agreed to a couple of conditions that we didn't think were too onerous.
These were
- The source is available so if anything goes wrong the modifications are not lost.
- The kickstarter stipulates that while the source will be available so the MapTool team could pick up where he left off we were receiving no money from the kickstarter so can't be held responsible for non delivery of his promises.
His response was along the lines of "I don't want people looking at my code until its ready" so we asked him how about a private repository where a trusted third party can provide access if he can't complete it. His response to that was what can only be best described as a non response by dodging the question. So if he is not willing to guarantee the source would be provided and let people know that he is not making promises on our behalf why would we come out and tell people it has our support. Especially when he wont even have a discussion about any of it with us. This I have all detailed before. What I have not gone into before is whole way he dealt with out efforts to help him with support of his kickstarter left a bad taste in my mouth, at times I feel he might of well just replied with a picture of himself raising his middle finger at us.
This is closer to what I suspected at the time. And, for the record, I think the conditions are totally legit and the least that should have been expected of him. Failure to comply or embrace them was, as far as I'm concerned, a fatal mistake.
The only people who backed the Mote team into a corner was the Mote team.
Well, it may be semantics... but lack of support was a pretty clear signal to the Mote team that they were, for all intents and purposes, on their own.
Frankly some of their behaviour towards backers was very disappointing. Like dropping MT legacy -- this was done fairly early on -- and telling supporters that its our (MapTools team) responsibility to ensure compatibility with Mote so complain to us and tell us to support what Mote is doing (no offer of providing any of the code they had to do this). Telling people they haven't reneged on the promise to release source because "as long as at least one person of the Mote team is alive the source could be released so you cant say we broke that promise until then"(ugh how childish).
So true. I've been critical of Mote on all of those things from the start.
It was always going to be its own thing, Lee never wanted it to be part of MapTool, and from his actions I am pretty sure he never intended for the functionality to be rolled back into MapTool.
I think he hoped/expected it to *be* the next Maptool. And, in his defense, so little had been going on with MT for so long that it wasn't a crazy thought. The future didn't look all that bright. So he probably thought he was making the next MT. Building MT 2.0 while 1.4 was still embryonic. And if Mote became what he said it was, I think it very well could have.
Full Bleed wrote:
Its greatest effect on MT was to, eventually, drive the release of the long-awaited (mythical) 1.4... which, ultimately, ended up being a shadow of what the core MT developers hyped it up to be.
This had nothing to do with the release of 1.4.
Well, not trying to be argumentative here, but I think it spurned some new activity that probably wouldn't have happened had it not "excited" the scene... much like this thread spurned you to respond (heck, we haven't heard from you in ages!) Regardless, finally getting out of the 1.3 feature lock was a good thing...
In hindsight I should have posted saying we don't support the kickstarter and please don't advertise it on the forums.
I agree. That probably would have been for the best. It would have hastened Mote's demise... and driven a deeper discussion about what MT's future was.