Amacythe,
Although I thought your post was quite convincing in its own way, it's unfortunate that it's such a pile of lies. Other replies have already addressed these points (Eren, akabugeyes, Antechinus, CountryLady, JayB...), but there are a few remaining things for me to say. I had personal comments to make, but I've decided not to post them in the end, and to keep it general, for the sake of the debate.
1/ What ForumGuy said about you may hurt you, and it's a caricature I can't condone, but the gist is that coders do the bulk of the work indeed. SMF is a huge project and requires knowing all of its source code very well if you want to update it without adding more bugs. Believe me, I've been studying it for years and I'm still not finished. So, in over 3 years, you made small tasks, attended 2 expos, organized a couple of internal meetings and sent plenty of T-shirts and other goodies. In the meantime, SMF2 was slowly dying due to the lack of developers.
Excuse me but I fail to see how strong your commitment was to the software.
It was already mentioned by other members that if you feel concerned about SMF's future, you should be stepping down because many developers would return in that case, which would be the best outcome for SMF. I'd love to know your opinion on that. After all, you're the only person to ever receive a salary for your 'contribution' to SMF. You can contribute by being more open.
2/ You didn't answer my earlier post. I didn't expect it, but still... I think it deserves to be made clear who wrote the quote I sent:
« You have every right to have the feelings that you do. But there are times when you must put your own feelings aside and react in a professional manner. Your comments reflect on SMF and our entire team if we do nothing when you violate our rules and core values. What's fair for one should be fair for all. »
By the way, guess who wrote that?
Of course, it was
you, Amacythe, who told me that by PM, because you felt I was being unprofessional in my decision to end one of my mods' development back in May 2009. I felt you were partly right in that respect, BTW.
However, as was pointed out many times in this topic, the
very same quote can be sent back right to you. Your actions reflect on SMF and the entire time. You violated SMF's core values several times recently. "What's fair for one should be fair for all." You're not above your own statement.
Maybe you don't deserve to take all the blame for what has happened, but as the owner of SMF, you should remember that what matters most is the health of your assets. If you'd rather see it die rather than leave it to a non-profit committee and turn it to open source, then you should also remember that you're not killing a software, you're killing a community, *and* you're making many, many team members angry because they feel like they've committed many years of their time to a project that had no future.
Even if you feel you're not responsible for all the team members leaving, you're still the 'manager'. And as manager, you know very well that you're taking responsibility for all the failure of the company. SMF2's development was started 4 years ago, it's a failure. You should step down if only because of that. Then tell the team you're a candidate to be re-elected. That's the way things are done.
Or, you could allow the Friends team to fork SMF2 into some other software. I'm 100% sure the Friends team will even allow SMF to take all improvements from the forked software and integrate them into SMF.
If none of this happens, more and more people will have to take sides. More and more mod developers will take their creation to another platform. Stop the bleeding while you still can, please.
