@Swamp--
Yes. JWocky stays. Israel, JWocky and I started Free Flight, Free Speech. Vincent joined us several months later as a moderator. There's a long history to that I won't go into here. You can read it in another part of the forum as it unfolded in real time.
What is important to understand this week, Swamp, is that although the bow was bent to the straining point, it didn't break. I'm certain the leaders in the other forum were close to popping their champagne bottles, cheering at the demise of Free Flight, because they predicted it would happen. They were not shy in telling us we would never survive a year or our first big crisis, that we were too "everything wrong" to not utterly fail.
Sorry, Curt and Thorsten. You guys never did understand the sheer grit and determination we have to make this work.
Sure, there are a few scrapes and bruises, but we are still talking to each other. Still kind of like each other. We are still committed to the same idea and ideals we expressed when we started Free Flight Free Speech and laid out a new vision for a better FlightGear. None of that has changed. Not on any of our parts.
We are still committed to the Bazaar paradigm of Open Source software development. If you don't recognize that reference, I am referring to Eric S. Raymond's seminal book on Open Source, titled
The Cathedral and the Bazaar. Raymond writes,
Freedom is good.
Hackers are naturally anti-authoritarian. Anyone who can give you orders can stop you from solving whatever problem you're being fascinated by -- and given the way autoritarian minds work, will generally find some appallingly stupid reason to do so. So the authoritarian attitude has to be fought wherever you find it, let it smother you and other hackers.
This isn't the same as fighting all authority. Children need to be guided and criminals restrained. A hacker may agree to accept some kinds of authority in order to get something he wants more than the time he spends following orders. But that's a limited, conscious bargain; the kind of personal surrender authoritarians want is not an offer.)
(You can buy this as an e-book on Amazon's Kindle; it's a read every would-be hacker should have.)
It was very much in Raymond's spirit that led Israel, JWocky and me to start Free Flight. Every day has been an experiment. Some days the experiment goes in a way ya just don't anticipate. But because we were all committed to the idea of freedom in Free Flight, we kept talking, communicating, and were able to restructure ourselves and sufficiently resolve our issues that we are keeping the place open.
FlightGear still needs a user forum where the Bazaar of flightsim ideas can flourish and be crafted and debated without fear of retribution or censorship. Frankly, you cannot do that on the other forum. We have the Club of the Banned as living proof of that!
We as the Admin team will continue to be about as imperfect as any four people could be. That is the one guarantee I can give you, beyond the fact that "Freedom is good!"
Skyboat