Best Of

I and many other said it from the beginning, Vanilla Corp. is digging it's grave. But they the fu** did know sooo much better all the years.

The Vanilla lead team was utterly shitty to it's most active members seeking to support.

The Vanilla dev team was mostly high-nosed and ignorant.

The Vanilla community tried to be helpful in their limited possibilities.

It's becoming clear that most of the people involved after Mark dealt absolutely unprofessionally with the community. It happened all in hindsight. Remember these "be happy that they OS it at all." comments – narf, I can only laugh at that. We the community built Vanilla to a good extend, but the Corp. was stupid enough to kill that richness month by month.

@Linc: It wouldn't needed a lot to give us a forum that's not hidden away from the main page, to give us more access to fix the addon repo (at least sort old extensions out), etc. this simple helping hands were just not given because of unprofessionalism of the acting people. Helping us a bit was not as "complicated".

Time to build a new frontend.

It's more complicated than that. In the end, taking the investment that spurred Vanilla 2 into life was the same force that doomed it as an open source project. If we're being honest, the open source project had been neglected since late 2014. Higher Logic simply bought Vanilla for its corporate customers & enterprise direction, which was a reasonable business choice. (Full disclosure: I held stock options in Vanilla so it directly benefited me.) The business model required to make money from small communities and open source software is many times more challenging than going for the large corporate customers, which is why Vanilla followed that course explicitly after 2014. The pressure to be able to return the investors' money led to following the less-risky strategy, which ultimately led to a buyout by a company with the same strategy.

It's an outcome that is probably more disappointing to me than anyone, but I at least witnessed many of choice made along the way that got us here, and I understand why it happened this way. It was less about amorphous "greed and corruption", and more about the natural outcome of operating in a system that only values control + financial outcomes. Each person individually can personally care about more, but the system will eat you in the end if you follow its rules.

With perfect hindsight, do I see how there could have been a different outcome? Sure. But at the time, the stress and risks involved drove the decisions and none of us had the experience to see another reliable path forward.

Anyway, I'm not trying to be an apologist for Higher Logic. It wouldn't cost them much to build a release and ship it. I just think no one cares enough to do it and there's little incentive to do so, while sales & marketing can come up with a whole list of reasonable-sounding concerns to not do it, which will dissuade casual interest in it from succeeding. You'd need a good plan & business justification to execute on it and I doubt anyone there has the combination of experience and belief required to do it.