Guild of Writers

The biggest issue with any open-source project is making it accessible to developers. I think OpenURU has failed spectacularly here. They still require developers to sign up to get code access, have no system in place to show active development branches, use an overly-complicated issue tracking system, and have no clearly-defined path for contributions to be accepted. These are the exact same issues they’ve had for the past three weeks, and though I’ve seen some activity on their forums towards getting these things resolved, I still don’t have much confidence in their team. The other big issue is that their core development team isn’t regularly contributing. I don’t know whether that’s due to lack of interest, lack of time, or lack of the knowledge needed to actively work on CWE. None of those are conditions you want from your code maintainers, though.

Compare this to the GoW: We immediately setup the code in a publicly-accessible area, with a simple bug tracking system. We quickly fixed the code and build system so it would be compatible with modern versions of visual studio, and at this point have even fixed it for Express editions – this is a major win for making the code accessible to a wider array of developers. We have documentation on how to build the code, and even a video tutorial available. GitHub makes it easy to see who’s actively working on the code, and its integrated pull request system makes it easy for developers to request their changes be included in our main development tree. And of course, our core development team is actively working on CWE.

Had OpenURU been ready, the GoW leadership would have happily worked with them. But the fact that after three weeks there has been no major progress on any of the issues I and others have raised, shows that the GoW development fork was definitely the right decision.