Aapje

I can't really answer this without getting another penalty, I think, so...

But by this logic you could justify never making an announcement, if the agreement covers an open-ended period of time, which is almost certainly the case for the regular contracts you sign with developers (since the contract would cover the period where the module is in the store, and there is presumably no reason to limit that period in advance). So then the agreement would only be fully implemented if the open-ended arrangement ends, which can be decades in the future. Anyway, still waiting to hear whether ED has fulfilled all of its obligations so far, under the agreement.

Why else would you sign an agreement other than to resolve an issue?

They indeed kept repeating that there was no resolution, even after that agreement was signed 8 months ago. And then suddenly they started telling us. So the flip is that they kept us in the dark about the settlement for 8 months and then suddenly said that it exists. And why? Because as far as I can tell there was no public official statement from Razbam, so they seem to have responded to the the alleged leaks that they tell us to ignore. Strange, to say the least. This is that ED said recently: null Yet fact is that they had new information to share since 8 months ago, but they simply refused to share it. And how is a settlement agreement not a resolution to the dispute? If ED signed a settlement agreement that they didn't think would resolve the dispute, then that itself raises serious questions about either their (lawyers) competence in drafting a good settlement agreement, their ability as an organization to follow the agreement, their willingness to follow the agreement, or their judgement of Razbam. I find it a bit hard to argue with you if you make these kinds of statements. AFAIK, Ron never publicly stated that he rejected the agreement and as you note, he is probably not allowed to do so. There is a mail floating around that is allegedly from Razbam's legal team. If you believe that this is real and was leaked by Ron, then you already have your answer why they rejected the agreement (a claim that ED is not making the required payments). So I don't understand how you can be unaware of the alleged reasons why Razbam withdrew from the settlement, yet believe that they did, when both of these claims are based on the exact same piece of (unverified) evidence. I understand, although from what I can tell, Razbam greatly improved as a company, and they did much better work in recent years, and kept on improving their modules, beyond what was promised. A lot of his workers/contractors that you agree are great people also share criticisms of ED. Of course it is possible that these people are being deceived by Ron, but another possibility is that ED is not treating the third party developers as they should. Apparently Razbam has lost a lot of talent, so at the very least it seems sad if the positive trajectory that Razbam was on does not continue.

In situations like these, where ED doesn't necessarily have the ability to force a new contract on the plane makers, you can easily get a chaotic situation. For example, some plane makers may have agreed to hand over or escrow the source code, while others may have resisted. And ED might not have been willing to treat all partners the same. For example, according to VEAO, they were not left with any option not to supply their source code for new modules, and because of that decided to leave DCS completely. But at the time they were selling only one module that clearly was not a huge seller. This is a very different situation for ED than losing Razbam or Heatblur, who make some very popular modules. So I can imagine that if RB or HB refused to agree to a new code sharing contract in the past, ED might have gone along with it, rather than have Razbam or Heatblur leave DCS. If something like this is the case, then it is also fully understandable that they wouldn't want to publicly state that some third parties got an exception, because that could result in other third parties refusing to sign such a contract or developers that already signed the new contract getting upset. If something like the above is true, then ED might have painted themselves in a corner a bit by promising that future modules would be safe from abandonment, if the actual truth is that this is not the case for all modules released (in early access) since VEAO left. Then they can't really walk back that statement without many in the community getting upset and demanding answers, that they would not be willing to give.

Seriously? You mean the consistency of suddenly flipping from 'we are still working on a resolution and we will tell you when we have one' to 'we signed an agreement to resolve the conflict 8 months ago'?

This makes zero sense. How does ED telling customers what the agreement says about maintenance and development of the Razbam planes, show a lack of good faith and that ED planned for the settlement to fail? By telling people this information, customers would then be partially empowered to hold ED accountable for upholding their part of the agreement, which would just increase the pressure on ED to follow that agreement. So telling people can reasonably be seen as a sign that they are not afraid of this scrutiny, which is true if they acted in good faith. The only way that telling people could have legal repercussions would be if they violated a part of the contract that says that they have to keep things secret, but it seems almost certain that the party who insisted on this extreme secrecy is ED, not Razbam. Is it really correct to leave customers in the dark for 8 months about an agreement, while selling these modules with zero information on the sales page of what customers can expect in the future, and while leaving those who already bought the modules frustrated and in the dark? And is it really correct to make the DCS customers suffer for a dispute over on the military side of ED, in the first place? And was it correct to immediately escalate the situation by withholding payments from Razbam, rather than first attempt to come to an agreement, so the impact on innocent developers/sub-contractors of Razbam would be minimized, as well as the impact on DCS customers? And Razbam has apparently made a bunch of claims that if true, paint ED in a very poor light. I do find it peculiar that ED is not even willing to go on the record to dispel (or validate) these statements in ways that do not use dodgy language, but that do not divulge any competitive secrets. For example, while the payment amounts are a competitive secret, the fact that ED is paying third party developers like Razbam based on module sales is not at all a secret. So ED could state that they either have made all the required payments (so far) as part of the settlement agreement, or state that they haven't, without ever having to divulge any actual secrets. That way they would show accountability for their own actions.

The actual full truth is hard to know since ED isn't very forthcoming with information about this sort of stuff. At the time, VEAO did put out a statement on their website: https://web.archive.org/web/20190322180249/https://veaosimulations.co.uk/ And recently, a VEAO developer spoke out: But keep in mind that both of these are one-sided perspectives, from one of the parties in the conflict.

A leaked image of one of the logistics team members:

I don't get that at all. Sounds like something is broken. Contact their support.

The complexity of modern software is so immense that your dream of perfect software is just a childish fantasy. For example, your belief in the 'silver bullet' of formal verification of software merely shows that you don't actually understand how that works, and especially, what the limitations are. For all but very small algorithms or systems, these need a major human contribution to tell the system what properties the software should have and not have, and that part is itself very prone to error. So if programmers would try to do what you want, the errors would still be there. A lack of flexibility is actually a major security risk, since there are a lot of systems out there running software with known vulnerabilities, but where the programmers can't upgrade it with a reasonable effort or at all. As I said before, at least in my neck of the (non-gaming) programmer woods, reducing the risk of exploitation is actually a major reason to migrate to new solutions. Even your silly fantasy of having all software being formally proven correct is not actually possible without rewriting the software completely with formal verification being used from the start, since it is a billion times less realistic to graft that onto existing software than to use it for completely new software (and that is itself rather unrealistic for most cases). So if you actually understood what you are asking for, you would understand that you are actually asking for a radical rewrite of nearly all software. But you clearly don't understand what you are asking for. So in this comparison, the software you want is a version of DCS where you can't control the plane? Because being able to control the plane requires there to be a hole in the system so your controller inputs go into the game. And you apparently also want a version of DCS that doesn't show anything to the user (on a flat screen or VR), because outputting video requires another hole. The issue is that in this fantasy of yours, there is not even a point in making that metal pot, because it doesn't do what people want. What people want is a colander with the holes in the right place, not a solid metal pot.

In most cases, no one is stopping you from running that old software. Yet people are rarely doing so despite having that option, proving you wrong when you say that: The problem with your narrative that all the blame lies with 'techbros' and execs is that you merely have to look at people's behavior to see that they do expect progress and innovation. How many people resisted the smartphone, and stuck an old IBM PC in their pocket instead? This again just shows that you don't get it. There is no shortage of work. Programmers would gladly build more features and do less maintenance and rebuilding if that was possible. Having the hardware go poof (and replacements not being sold anymore) is/was actually a major issue for our company with our non-cloud version. We constantly have customers begging for more features. It is indeed not worth putting an immensely heavy steel door in a house to secure it, or put in a $1000 lock, when the thieves can just avoid that door completely and break and enter through a window. I bet you don't actually live in a bunker either, and if so, your accusations are pure hypocrisy, since you accept limited security as well, even though you could easily spend all your money on increased security. But it's easy to tell others what to do with their money, and a whole different ballgame when it is your own money, isn't it? This is just not true. There are all kinds of legitimate reasons that the system has the capabilities that it does. For example, you cannot have GPU drivers with giving third party software access to the low level hardware. And ransomware doesn't even need low level access anyway, but just access to your files, to hold those ransom. So the only way to truly prevent that is to not give software access to your files, but that is one of the key features of a computer. In practice, we also see that if the system gets locked down so much that it becomes too hard for people to do what they want, people often simply side-step the security and use solutions that are far less secure. Yes, in most cases it is the user that did something dumb to open that door. In general, I think that most exploits nowadays are targeted at the person and don't even actually hack anything. For example, the 'I need help' scams, where the exploiters pretend to be a loved one, simply have the person transfer the money. The bank app is not hacked at all. But you cannot block money transfers to other people without making it impossible for people to buy stuff.

@big_fun Care to leave a review? How well does the trackpad work?

The entire software & hardware industry has been making innovations along the way. @bfr named a few, but there are many more examples, like decoupling the soft- and hardware ever more. It used to be that you ran one program at a time on a computer, so if that program didn't need all the power of the computer, the rest of the capacity would be wasted, even if you had something useful for the PC to do. You couldn't run multiple things at once. Then they developed multi-tasking, which in turn opened the way to having different users share a computer. And nowadays we have the cloud where you simply request resources and you don't even know or care anymore which real hardware your code runs on. Note that some of these innovations that were intended for servers, actually benefit consumers today, since DOS, Windows 3.1 and Windows 95/98 (and the old MacOS) were unstable messes that didn't properly prevent software from damaging the system or other software on the computer. In servers where people share the system, that is not just a crash or data corruption risk, but a security risk. Both MS and Apple abandoned their consumer OS in favor of a new OS designed for servers, and thanks to that we have way more stable systems. Another example is that in the past, we would set up servers manually, so we would never know exactly what was done to a server over the years, or where the files are that we added. So if a rebuild or migration or upgrade of a server was needed, it was always a pain to know how to set the new server up or how to keep things working. Nowadays we package server-software with a layered system, so we can see exactly what layers we have and what is in each layer. For example, you may have a OS layer that is maintained by one group, and then another group adds a Java runtime layer on top of that, and then you add your own software on top of those layers. All of that is created based on a sort of recipe, similar to how you can bake a cake by following a recipe. That way you can fairly easily do an OS or Java Runtime upgrade, since you just change the layers in the recipe, and rebake that software cake. This is much quicker, safer and easier than to have to manually upgrade things. On Windows and in gaming that is not yet copied, although for regular software on Linux, a light version of that solution is often used. Now, to you it might seem that people are just changing things up for no reason, but there is actually a lot of innovation going on. That's why nowadays we try to build software in more maintainable, smaller chunks, so we can replace chunks, rather than all of it. And you don't actually get it. The choice that customers/bosses have is not to have the exact same software, but with prettier source code, but to either have a system where changes cost immense effort (and thus lots of money), and run a big risk of causing problems, that programmers cannot prevent. Or alternatively, to make an investment that will pay itself back since you can then add new features at much lower cost and with much less risk of incidents. You're like the old guy who is telling the builder that he is just trying to scam him for unnecessary work, when the old guy is living in a house with a hole in the roof, a rotten foundation and a DIY electricity system that can short-circuit and burn down the house at any moment. Only at very high cost, and by limiting the functionality of the software. In most cases that is simply not worth the cost, especially since you are wrong, and at most you can prevent some forms of hacking. One of the most successful forms of hacking is social engineering, where they hack the human, not the software. So no software is truly unhackable unless there is no human involves, but then what is the use of the software? Yet those games are not actually build with old technology. They are just made to look retro. They also support high resolution displays. And typically they also use modern gaming innovations that you don't tend to notice until you go back to the old games. I remember going back to Dune II, and my great memories were dashed a bit by how clunky the interface is, compared to newer RTS games. There is a reason why fans made an enhanced version (Dune Dynasty). So even that classic game suffers from software rot in the sense that people's expectations have moved on.

Those locomotives are really no different to the ancient games and software that people keep running on either preserved hardware, or emulators that mimic that hardware, including its many flaws. That evades exactly one of the issues I named, a changing environment. But no one balances their sheets on Excel 1.0 and most gamers are not into the old games. Note that no one uses those century+ old locomotives for their historic purpose, but they are only used for tourism and museums. It's really no different with old software. This is just due to supply and demand. There are programmers who love to do the same kind of programming that John Carmack did early on, where games were written in assembly, which is very close to the raw hardware (or at least the abstraction layer over the hardware). But aside from some rare exceptions, no one is willing to have programmers spend a ton of effort on relatively little functionality, nor do people nowadays tend to accept the limitations of the software of yesterday. So it's as useful to blame programmers for not sticking with that old software, as it is to blame railroad engineers for moving to electric trains, with wifi, charge ports, etc.

Not true, in software development there are a whole lot of reasons for software to have a shelf life, including: The environment changing and code needing to be adapted or rewritten to just remain working in the new environment. For example, to keep working on a new version of Windows. Increasing or changing expectations. For example, visual quality that was acceptable in 2000 often isn't considered acceptable anymore. But also things like FFB becoming popular again and players expecting support. Or things like DLSS and related technologies. The software being built on obsolete libraries or with obsolete technology. Then it may become impossible to find developers who can work on the code and you will import the software rot of these libraries. People leaving who understand the code, and people making increasingly uninformed changes to the code (putting hacks on hacks), due to a lack of understanding, until the code becomes a bowl of spaghetti. Decisions having been made in the past that no longer fit the new requirements/environment/etc, but so much having become dependent on these changes, that attempts to change it are like pulling bricks from a Jenga-tower. With every additional change, the tower becomes less stable. And the cost of making changes can become enormous, for example, when you would have to alter every mission already made, to accommodate a change you want to make to the code. Vestigial code that just gets in the way and can cause bugs. These things often intermingle and compound on each other. One of the main parts of the job of software developers is to try to minimize these issues, but also making the hard choice between continuing on an ever more difficult struggle with ever more deteriorating code, versus making a partial or full clean start.

Keep in mind that this is merely what they are claiming and that 'good faith' is one of these vague terms that is rather meaningless unless it comes from an independent third party like a judge. People tend to see it as good faith on their part even if they put their own interests above those of others, because that's just how people are. Do you think that ED (or anyone else) would ever say about themselves that they acted in bad faith? Since almost no one ever says that they acted in bad faith, it is also not worth that much if people say that they acted in good faith.

Alibaba is a B2B shop, so the intent is that you buy in bulk and then sell in low quantity to the end user. For example, here someone is doing so on Amazon US: https://www.amazon.com/INSTAWOW-Bluetooth-Touchpad-Control-Compatible/dp/B0DWKY3QGF And on the German Amazon someone is trying to scam people with absurd prices: https://www.amazon.de/-/en/D06PRO/dp/B0DYCN3G9W @big_fun How did you actually buy it? Did you buy a sample through Alibaba or did you buy it elsewhere?

We actually don't know if any work has been done. For example, one possibility is that Razbam has a patch ready, but that they are unwilling to give it to ED because they feel that the conditions are not met. Another possibility is that no work has been done yet. We don't know.

We have no idea what they did during that period.

Not sure that more than 6 months is briefly.

All it means that the EU legislature has to respond to it, which in itself is huge, since they have huge legitimacy problems. So if there is an initiative that actually comes from the populace, instead of the lobbyists or the elite, they have a chance to show that they are not 100% anti-democratic.

Because they are not actually facts. They are the claims by one party in the conflict, who obviously has a strong incentive to present the situation in a way where they look the best. There has been no judge who has vetted those claims and established to what extent they are right or wrong, and what important details are being left out of that narrative, nor is there evidence given for most of EDs claims, so we can vet the claims ourselves. Until you accept that you are biased and don't actually tell the truth, but simply parrot ED's claims, you are going to be continuously frustrated with those who won't just assume that one side of the conflict is 100% right and honest, and the other side is 100% wrong and dishonest. I do have a tendency to put more stock into actual evidence, than claims that don't have any evidence behind them, although I am critical of which stuff is released and what evidence is not released. This is simply a lie. I don't. Again, with your immense bias, it must seem like anyone who doesn't 100% buy into EDs narrative must instead believe Razbam, but that is a you problem. This excessively broad confidentiality clause is not actually in the interest of us consumers, since it limits the extent to which we can hold the various parties accountable for their actions and make informed decisions. For example, there are people here who believe that they will be safe from such shenanigans if they don't buy product made by RB. There are also people who refuse to buy any third party module. And there are people making other choices yet again. Yet for all of these choices, there is a lack of solid information to make a fully informed choice. That you unquestionably back the confidentiality clause seems to be a case of Stockholm Syndrome, where you mistakenly believe that whatever is in EDs interest, must be in the interest of consumers. This is simply a lie. Obviously a lot of stuff they have has not been leaked, beyond just the contracts. Secondly, what was allegedly leaked is not a cease and desist letter, but a letter of demand. How do you know that they didn't seek legal guidance from the beginning? An assumption with zero proof. Which he may not be allowed to do due to the confidentiality clause. A lot of your arguments are some sort of bizarre bipolar vacillation between the claim that Razbam must obey the confidentiality clause and complaints that they are not leaking more than they are. You really need to make up your mind. Also note that it's EDs position that as DCS customers, we are not supposed to care about or comment on what happens over on the commercial military side of ED. So why are you blaming RB for playing by EDs rules this time? False. I'm very careful not to do that. We have no hard evidence that RB broke their contract. So this is not fact, but an allegation. We have no evidence of a cease and desist. You seem to be ignorant of the difference between a letter of demand and a cease and desist. Furthermore, the allegedly leaked letter of demand has not been confirmed as true by any of the parties involved and ED tells us to not to assume this (but ED also refuses to clarify whether the leaked documents are real). This is also a good example of your inconsistency, because you attack me for putting some stock in the leaked documents, but here you are clearly assuming that the leaked document is real. If you are allowed to assume that, then why would it be wrong for others to do so? Clearly you only object to people using the leaked documents as evidence for claims that you dislike. We don't actually have hard evidence that (most of) the leaks are from Razbam, although it seems a very reasonable assumption. But still just an assumption. Note that ED has also made statements that most likely violate those very same confidentiality clauses, but you don't seem to care about that. Your final sentence is again not a fact, since the claim by one side seems to be that they did accept the settlement agreement, but that ED didn't follow the agreement. Also, if you had any objectivity at all, you would realize that ED can also be accused of using the community as a weapon, based on how they communicate to the public.

Even if RB violated a contract, that doesn't mean that the damages are greater than money that RB is supposed to get. For example, imagine that you broke a laptop charger at work and you are liable to pay the cost. Then it would not be reasonable for the company to dock you many thousands of dollars/euros, when the charger costs way less than that. Ah, so you KNOW* things. * = making stuff up But RB seems to have signed the settlement agreement, so you are again saying things that go against the facts. Except that is also not how it works, except in your mind.

What logic is this? If you worked for a company and they stopped paying, would you keep working without pay until you lost your house, or would you try to find another job to prevent you from losing your house? And you ignore that there is supposed to be a settlement, that supposedly says that RB would work on the modules, but for some reason that agreement is no longer being accepted as valid. Yet we do not know all terms of the contract and to what extent each side followed it, so it is impossible to judge it on fact, although clearly, many people think that their bias is as good as facts. Pretending that you speak for others is another tick on the bingo card for someone who writes irrational things.