Recent Travails of SMF Team and Friends

[Arantor]

Most of the people who wrote a goodly chunk of 2.0 have already been hounded out, and most of the people who would have gone on to be the next generation of SMF's maintainers have gone too.

[NoobDeveloper]

ForumGuy789: Not even potential members of the programmers' team? People to join the ranks and help the program grow?

Oh, and I won't disagree about the trolling comment, eh, weightman?

Nice DP Arantor 

[Orstio]

I hate to say, but I'm a bit disappointed by the post as well. I do understand the need to defend one's self with all the bad stuff going around in public, maybe only half of it true (with a very loose definition of "true"), but one also needs to look reasonable, and that wasn't shown.

I think on both sides of the matter there are people who are so determined to prove they are "right" that they will do anything they can to achieve that goal. They may not want to kill the SMF community, but they aren't seeing that their pursuit of their goal tramples all over the project.

Both sides have committed poor actions and both sides also need to realize that they must compromise to save the project they claim to love. I see too many people taking a hardliner stance of ultimatum, but that won't serve anything because their minds are closed to any other possible solution.

Please, for the love of SMF, both sides please be prepared to give on a few points to save the project. Campaigning to force Amy out won't achieve anything but anger and a further hardening of positions. You feel it may prove you right, but it's a road to failure. Rather, aim to reduce the influence she can have in the areas you have a problem with her being. Get some more managing partners added, work on finding the right company structure for the project to survive, and leave the ultimatums at the door.

The problems didn't occur overnight and they won't be solved instantly or by any one action.

I agree with your assessment.

Do you see any way, however, that Amy can remain in her current position, or anywhere on the team for that matter, and not provoke defensive tactics against another coup d'etat?  So long as she's there, the feeling of her attempting this course again will remain.  The lack of trust needs to go.  I don't see how it can go while she remains.  Do you?

[krick]

http://www.simplemachines.org/about/license.php

Simple Machines LLC reserves the right to change the terms of this Agreement at any time, although those changes are not retroactive to past releases.

Find a past release with a less restrictive license and fork SMF from there.  If even a fraction of the disgruntled ex-SMF developers came back and worked on the fork, it wouldn't take that long to build an SMF 2.0 compatible fork.

People would just have to be VERY careful that they did the whole thing clean room and didn't use any existing SMF source.  Granted, the code would look very similar because there's only so many ways to do something in PHP.

The other potential solution would be to start from scratch on SMF 3.0 (though you'd have to call it something else) and focus on making the conversion from SMF 1.1 and 2.0 as painless as possible for the end user.  I suspect that this approach is already underway behind the scenes.

SMF is dead. Long live SMF.

[Arantor]

The only past release with a less restrictive license is YaBBSE, I believe which SMF was forked from.

(Pssst, there are rumours of starting something completely from scratch elsewhere.)

[Kindred]

ok...   Sorry, ForumGuy, but you are wrong.

Without support staff, the program will fail just as surely as without developers.
Without documentation and internationalization...   etc and so forth.

Yes, the developers are important, but so is the rest of the team, and no one is irreplaceable or "required" for SMF to survive.

(and SMF *WILL* survive.)

[TurtleKicker]

As one of the actual owners of Simple Machines (legally), I feel that I owe the community my opinion.

I want to thank you for your post. It's helpful for the community, most of whom don't have the inside information, to see the thoughts and opinions of respected people who are on the inside and do have that information. As one of the only 3 legal owners of SMF, your words hold weight.

I am wondering if you'd be willing to clarify some confusion and disagreement on one point that involves you:

1) Did you ask Amy for the financial records (which you are legally entitled to, being an LLC partner, and she's legally required to produce on-request of one of the other LLC partners)?

2) Did she honor your request?

You're right... the "he said she said" stuff is crazy. Antechinus says you did, Amy says you didn't. I am hoping that bit by bit we can settle the ambiguity of some of these issues so certain questions of what is "true" and what is really happened can be put to rest, allow us to move forward. You're in a unique position to settle this particular issue once and for all, for the benefit of the community.

You needn't provide more than "yes" or "no" if you don't have the energy to elaborate, but some clarification to this issue even with just Y/N would be extremely helpful.

Thanks.

[MultiformeIngegno]

Is Amy (after her post) at least posting something in private boards?
I don't think it's really useful to post only one time and then disappear.....

[ForumGuy789]

ok...   Sorry, ForumGuy, but you are wrong.

Without support staff, the program will fail just as surely as without developers.
Without documentation and internationalization...   etc and so forth.

Yes, the developers are important, but so is the rest of the team, and no one is irreplaceable or "required" for SMF to survive.

(and SMF *WILL* survive.)

If you don't currently have a bunch of free good quality programmers knocking at your door right now to help out, then you're wrong. I'm simply stating that the programmers here are the ones with the real skills. They are making the program.

There are plenty highly-successful, large, popular programs out there that are made by a single programmer or a few programmers who alone also control every aspect of the business. Controlling the business is the easy part - especially when you do not market a physical product, or do physical advertising. You're not even charging customers. You only have to deal with donations.

So yes, other team members are important and help, but they are much more replaceable than programmers.

To count a programmer and non-programmer as equal in importance during negotiations is the first step to destroying SMF.

[GravuTrad]

Devs are clearly the most important thing. But the rest of the team too.

After, for the friends, if you don't want comments, the team shoudn't post this in public, and smf friends too...you can't stop comments if you post it publicly....

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

If you don't currently have a bunch of free good quality programmers knocking at your door right now to help out, then you're wrong. I'm simply stating that the programmers here are the ones with the real skills. They are making the program.

Just take a sneak peek at the current team page, and then to the Friends list - and compare

To count a programmer and non-programmer as equal in importance during negotiations is the first step to destroying SMF.

No - No - And No. SMF was built on the idea of the team being equals. So no single person should be more important than the rest, specially not more important than the majority of the rest.

[krick]

The only past release with a less restrictive license is YaBBSE, I believe which SMF was forked from.

Then start there.  The hardest part of any software development effort is figuring out first what to do, then figuring out second how to do it. Once you get there, the coding is easy.  It's like 80% research, planning, and design and 20% actual coding.  The 80% part has been done already so that can be leveraged to help create an SMF 2.0 "clone" using YaBBSE as the starting point.

[ForumGuy789]

No - No - And No. SMF was built on the idea of the team being equals. So no single person should be more important than the rest, specially not more important than the majority of the rest.

Sure, but I'm not commenting on the idea that SMF was built around. I'm commenting on what works in reality. In reality certain things are more important than other things.

[krick]

In reality certain things are more important than other things.

LOL.  This needs to be a signature.  Or maybe a t-shirt.

[Amanda.]

In reality certain things are more important than other things.

LOL.  This needs to be a signature.  Or maybe a t-shirt.

Or an episode of Sesame Street.

[Christian Land]

No - No - And No. SMF was built on the idea of the team being equals. So no single person should be more important than the rest, specially not more important than the majority of the rest.

Sure, but I'm not commenting on the idea that SMF was built around. I'm commenting on what works in reality. In reality certain things are more important than other things.

In reality, everybody is replaceable. In reality, Its just a question of money vs. time. For example: if your main coder goes away and you have lots of money but no time, you'll just hire some awesome coding-god who will solve your problems. Or if you have lots of time and no money, you hire a less talented coder who will solve the problems in a longer period of time. Thats how the software-business works.

[TurtleKicker]

Then start there.  The hardest part of any software development effort is figuring out first what to do, then figuring out second how to do it. Once you get there, the coding is easy.  It's like 80% research, planning, and design and 20% actual coding.  The 80% part has been done already so that can be leveraged to help create an SMF 2.0 "clone" using YaBBSE as the starting point.

I think the issue here is that the overwhelming majority of those with the coding skills and the interest see the roadblock in the way of them continuing where they left off with SMF 2 to be a simpler and more-sensible obstacle to remove than the work it'd take to roll back several years of coding efforts.

[JayBachatero]

Really Amy?  I didn't know you would stoop this low.  I really have nothing else to say to you.  You prefer to let SMF go down than to admit to all the stuff you've done, the amount of team members that you have pushed out because you have an issue with getting close to people.  One you get close you tend to push people out and that's what you did to many of us.  Or your ways of manipulating the team into thinking you're suicidal.  But I'm just going to just stay quiet and not even bother anymore. 

These little PR stunts that you are pulling ain't helping you at all.  You have no people skill what so ever.  I think this issue is beyond repair sad though cause I still love SMF and it's a great piece of software.

BTW so you prefer to bring this all out to the public this way before even discussing it with the friends and trying to work things out.  Show's how much you actually care about the project.

[Arantor]

Then start there.  The hardest part of any software development effort is figuring out first what to do, then figuring out second how to do it. Once you get there, the coding is easy.  It's like 80% research, planning, and design and 20% actual coding.  The 80% part has been done already so that can be leveraged to help create an SMF 2.0 "clone" using YaBBSE as the starting point.

SMF 1.0 was the result of the fork. And that was a major rewrite too.

[Rowdy]

Why would anyone, especially someone with great programming skill, want to be a part of any team which regarded them as completely unimportant and disposable? Unity is achieved only by treating all individuals as vitally important. As soon as you get in to this team above all stuff, you start getting cliques, elitism, power-lusters rising to power by preaching the 'common good', internal bitterness, jealousy, strife, and finally chaos.