Emerald Viewer has, apparently, undergone some restructuring. They have indeed deposed, and apparently beheaded, Fractured Crystal.
They promise that, henceforth, there will be one fair, level playing field; this will, near as I can tell, be achieved by making Arabella, a nominally neutral party (accurate at least insofar as she’s unlikely to be making coding decisions, I suppose) have control of the servers.
A minor problem here: Emerald was already a level playing field. All developers have always had svn commit access. All developers have always had write access to the website. The servers were technically owned by Fractured, but Chalice, Discrete, Phox and Fractured all had full administrative access – and Phox and Chalice were the ones who actually did all the administrating (which one varied depending on which server you were referring to). Fractured was sufficiently incompetent that he couldn’t set up a cron job I needed, and I had to paste him the line. Ironically, this was the cron job that regenerated their login screen every five minutes. (I wrote the login screen; it didn’t have any ridiculous iframes at the time.)
Fractured, for all the “leader” status that he seems to have acquired, was never really the leader in any non-monetary sense. If people disagreed with him, they would ignore what he said – and he was less revert-war happy than many others, so ignoring him was frequently successful. By saying this, I do not wish to implicate the others in this latest event; I shall assume they simply didn’t notice that he did it. I was not party to that discussion, having already left by the time it happened.
The restructuring effort, effectively, boils down to “We don’t like the ModularSystems name, or the ongoing association with Onyx, or the IP logging, or…” – which was always an ongoing discussion; moreso since Modular Systems LLC was incorporated (or we were told it was; anyone found the registration records yet?).
Oh, and if it’s a level playing field, why are there only three people to contact? They can’t have lost all but two developers and their leader/PR. That’s about as level as before, then, from an external perspective; “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
As an addendum: I do trust Jessica to a reasonable extent, but she seems to be quite happily spinning this “restructuring” effort to be far more significant than it actually is. I’m surprised.
