Yes, we can postpone $txt to later -- but remember how we postponed changing SMF stuff to Wedge for later...? I'm doing it now because I fear I will forget later, and I'd rather have done it before...
:PI'm not disputing that it's not exactly pleasant for us to be taking from SMF without giving something back,
We are giving things back.
- Several years of work for the SMF community from the both of us. We gave that without getting anything in return. I think at least half of the SMF team agrees that it's only fair to consider we don't owe SMF anything -- and it's the other way around.
- The changelog. It might seem like nothing, but as I said multiple times, it documents the entire list of SMF bugs that we fixed. It's up to the SMF team to process the changelog, analyze what they need changing, and do it themselves. I made over 400 bug reports at Mantis, including many *after* I was post-banned from SMF. I didn't suddenly stop spotting and fixing bugs in SMF... The only difference, now, is that I can't submit them directly to SMF because they removed my beta tester account. And even then, I'm still making the changelog public and thus the list of SMF bugs is now accessible.
- The ideas. We published our feature list months ago, and we're now discussing publicly as much as we can of our current ideas and implementations (just look at this very topic, since we're totally OT here.) Ideas can't be copyrighted. SMF can steal those ideas, we can't do anything about it -- except to take note that they considered our ideas to be good enough to steal them... We own our implementations of these ideas. But they may not even be the *best* implementations of it. (Although, TBH, I don't think the current SMF developer team is up to the task to make better implementations...
:whistle:)
So, yeah, I'm sorry but at this point, I can see a lot of things we're giving back to the SMF community.
If all the SMF team wants is *for us to share our code*, then they should have asked us to become the SMF developer team a year ago. Instead, they showed us the way out, indicating they didn't feel the need for our ideas and work.
It's as simple as that... It would be quite preposterous from the SMF team to expect anything more than what we're currently giving them.
but I feel firmly that I gave a lot more to SMF than I've got back from them so far...
Couldn't agree more.