waiting for resolution ED/RAZBAM Situation Info & Discussion

[bfr]

15 hours ago, freehand said:

How many RB modules do you own ?

As i'd mentioned in earlier posts, i've had both the Harrier and Strike Eagle since launch and I would've finally bought the Mirage 2000 but for the beginnings of disquiet between ED and RB meaning their older modules never appeared in a sale again. So yes, I do have skin in the game as and when these modules cease to work.

Edited 5 hours ago by bfr

[Dragon1-1]

43 minutes ago, bfr said:

Bad design is and has always been and always will be a thing.

...and that's why, when you've got an instance of good design on your hands, you have an incentive to try to avoid "upgrading" it to a bad one. This very forum is a good example of exactly that happening, both with the software (Invision is a Javascript-infested crud that just about every forum I'm on "upgraded" to) and the board layout change.

43 minutes ago, bfr said:

Good luck getting replacement parts in a hurry for that IBM XT that you've had chugging away running MS DOS 3 in the corner since 1990 and now means a critical link in a business process is dead in the water until its sorted. 

Good thing you can run DOS programs on Windows XP, then, which can actually be installed on modern-ish hardware. In any case, upgrades are also a risk, especially if there was some minor change that means your instrument is now a million dollar brick. Sourcing vintage computer parts might actually be easier than getting a 1990s CNC router to talk to something recent.

43 minutes ago, bfr said:

Do you think software engineers 'move fast and break things' because they actively desire to or because people who pay theirs wages often demand the moon on a stick by Wednesday morning?

They do it because it makes their execs more money in short term, sustainability be damned, and the cons salespeople had firmly convinced the customers that not only can they get a moon on a stick on every other Wednesday morning, it'll be so much better than the one they got last week. Hard to do with locomotives because you can't just slap a new coat of paint on an old loco and pretend it's a new model, not to mention you have to physically build the thing. The current state of affairs is largely on early techbros like Bill Gates, who sold people crap, and then sold them every fix and tweak to that crap, pretending they're groundbreaking innovations. The end result is, a bad initial product looks "innovative" because it gets constantly gets "improved" by removing holes that shouldn't have been there in first place. Nowadays it's normalized, and it's creeping into other industries like computer hardware (especially smartphones and tablets) and even cars, though at least there it's finally getting some customer pushback. 

43 minutes ago, bfr said:

Those are all things that can be done on modern systems provided you know how to set them up and manage them properly.

Yes, with great effort and careful management, as opposed of this being an inherent property of the underlying system. That's my point, programmers like things that are flexible and general purpose, but freedom is counterproductive when it enables exploits that have to be explicitly guarded against. You can have a colander and a guy whose job is to spot and plug every hole in it, or you can have a solid metal pot. Which one is less likely to leak?

Edited 4 hours ago by Dragon1-1

[aaronwhite]

17 hours ago, Raven (Elysian Angel) said:

You'd be surprised... Home users probably moved on but I suggest you step into your local government building and look over the shoulder of the people working at their work PCs.
Many companies also still use Windows XP even to this day.

While it's off topic, I know a lot of places generally are moving as far from XP as possible. Downside being, some systems, especially in healthcare, government and education were created for XP years ago and became backbones of systems that everyone's reliant on, and replacing them means finding a new solution entirely (which is super expensive and difficult) or continuing to support the XP version. 

I can only speak from the security perspective, but we've been doing a lot of hard work in the past few years to track down every XP system and get it off of the network, and when it's not possible, we get it as isolated as we possibly can since it's no longer being updated with security patches. 

[bfr]

40 minutes ago, Dragon1-1 said:

...and that's why, when you've got an instance of good design on your hands, you have an incentive to try to avoid "upgrading" it to a bad one. This very forum is a good example of exactly that happening, both with the software (Invision is a Javascript-infested crud that just about every forum I'm on "upgraded" to) and the board layout change.

Really? I can't say i've ever pined for the old one back. It was briefly less familiar but i'm struggling to think of the old one did that this one doesn't.  You'll have to ask ED what their motivation to change was, perhaps support was a consideration.

40 minutes ago, Dragon1-1 said:

Good thing you can run DOS programs on Windows XP, then, which can actually be installed on modern-ish hardware. In any case, upgrades are also a risk, especially if there was some minor change that means your instrument is now a million dollar brick. Sourcing vintage computer parts might actually be easier than getting a 1990s CNC router to talk to something recent.

Yes, upgrades often aren't risk free and are usually a risks v benefits thing.

- Am I going to get better features/performance/outcomes by doing this?

- Is it going to be easier to support than what I currently have?

If both the answers are no then don't bother by all means as there is genuinely no point. Usually though one or both things are true.

40 minutes ago, Dragon1-1 said:

They do it because it makes their execs more money in short term, sustainability be damned, and the cons salespeople had firmly convinced the customers that not only can they get a moon on a stick on every other Wednesday morning, it'll be so much better than the one they got last week.

I work on an in-house team for a company. We don't directly sell what we write but the business very much depends on it to provide a service and make money so we all get paid.  Sustainability is hugely important and the bit you seem to miss is that getting rid of old stuff that is difficult to maintain and support going forwards is often an integral part of sustaining that. We innovate because our competition does and thus if we don't then we ultimately lose out as a business.

40 minutes ago, Dragon1-1 said:

Hard to do with locomotives because you can't just slap a new coat of paint on an old loco and pretend it's a new model, not to mention you have to physically build the thing. The current state of affairs is largely on early techbros like Bill Gates, who sold people crap, and then sold them every fix and tweak to that crap, pretending they're groundbreaking innovations. The end result is, a bad initial product looks "innovative" because it gets constantly gets "improved" by removing holes that shouldn't have been there in first place. Nowadays it's normalized, and it's creeping into other industries like computer hardware (especially smartphones and tablets) and even cars, though at least there it's finally getting some customer pushback. 

Weird flex. Software can and often does take ages to write and its not like every single traditional engineering project is revolutionary/designed completely from scratch rather than iterative.

40 minutes ago, Dragon1-1 said:

Yes, with great effort and careful management, as opposed of this being an inherent property of the underlying system. That's my point, programmers like things that are flexible and general purpose, but freedom is counterproductive when it enables exploits that have to be explicitly guarded against. You can have a colander and a guy whose job is to spot and plug every hole in it, or you can have a solid metal pot. Which one is less likely to leak?

It has always been with great effort and careful management. Its entirely possible to balls up a Unix system or whatever other platform you care to mention by haphazardly setting things up or not keeping on top of things like patches and updates.  God knows i've seen enough of them.

Edited 4 hours ago by bfr

[aaronwhite]

On 7/25/2025 at 3:44 PM, av8orDave said:

Sure, all is well with what you wrote, but you're excusing ED for not already having a solution in place that ensures the continuity of modules sold on their website, that exist in their ecosystem, in the context of this having happened with another 3rd party before. Not acceptable. Razbam may very well be the party in the wrong here, but shame on ED for leaving their customers hanging because they have no continuity plan if a 3rd party exits or goes sideways.

I know I'm writing this days later, but I'm not excusing it. I'm saying people seem to be oversimplifying solutions here. 

My timeline may be off here, but my understanding of the situation (potentially biased as it may be) is that Razbam and ED were working together without any issue, and it seems that during that time, Razbam never got around to providing their source code, which was confirmed by Razbam and ED. It seemingly wasn't just the F-15E, but all of their modules. I don't know what the contracts stated was required in terms of timelines, or if there was some delay for whatever reason, but it seems that Razbam never turned over their source code, and my assumption following that is that ED eventually resorted to the only real trump card they held, which was stopping payments to Razbam and cutting off access to the DCS development system until that source code was provided. 
This seemed to be where things publicly blew up, as Razbam went out to announce only that they hadn't been paid, while seemingly leaving out the "We also didn't provide our source code" issue that was only mentioned later, and not even as an issue, more as a way of saying "ED are screwed without us, because we didn't provide them the source code so they can't fix out things". 
That all lead to the court case, which gets us to where we sit now, which is two legal teams made a bunch of legally binding agreements and handed them down to people. Having dealt with legal teams to some degree in my job, all I know is that a lot of the time, most of the company has little to no involvement, and the conversations are often not two way streets. Lawyers are very specific in what they will tell you, and they likely sent everyone an email that basically said "We've reached an agreement, you can discuss the following:" which is what we then received from ED. But that's all we're going to receive, because ED legally can't say anything without breaking the agreement and likely opening themselves up to more expensive legal issues.

So I guess I'm not excusing ED, I'm just saying I understand how it was a difficult situation to plan for, and one that's difficult to deal with now. It burns ED on multiple fronts. ED has to deal with the reputation hit and public anger that is getting directed at them, even though it's possible this entire situation was entirely outside of their control. Assuming my timeline is what happened, it seems to me that the entire issue came about because Razbam wasn't providing ED with something ED needed to try and prevent this whole situation from being possible at all. But then on top of the public image hit, ED also now is stuck in a place where they have to provide the finances to support people. Either by offering refunds that would essentially be giving away digital product for no money (obviously, not the worst thing in the world, but it does still suck for a company giving up ~$60 for something beyond their control) and on top of that, they've had to pay all of these expensive lawyers to do work for the past few years, only to be met with an agreement that leaves them publicly able to say pretty much nothing. 

It's a crap situation for everyone, and from my take, it's frustrating because it feels like Razbam seemingly get to walk away without much issue on their end. They aren't working in DCS, sure, but that doesn't stop them from going to a more lucrative market like MSFS and getting to produce modules that potentially have a fraction of the complexity (no need to worry about weapons and sensors if you're just wanting to make a fun to fly jet that zips around in MSFS) and make money that way. 

Am I potentially being too generous to ED here? Sure. I might be. But I'm just going off of what I've seen posted here and on the Razbam Discord, and everything I've seen has lead me to believe that things were going smoothly until Razbam was cut off from being paid. And nothing logically makes sense to me for that to happen out of the blue, especially just with one developer, outside of it being a "final straw" type moment where ED did the only thing they could to try and force the resolution outside of going to court. 

I hope ED can figure out a way to fix the situation, but the reality is, it just feels like they are stuck eating a lot of the blame while a third party developer gets to just go off and do their own thing. ED gets the burden of having to deal with angry users if updates break the Razbam modules, and seemingly also catches most of the blame for whatever solution they propose following all of this. I've enjoyed the Harrier for a while now. It was one of my first planes, and I really hope ED can keep it working. But I'm personally most frustrated with Razbam, because until something comes out that tells me otherwise, I feel like they are the ones most responsible for possibly screwing me out of a module I enjoy. 

[Czar66]

5 hours ago, mondo said:

I would quite happily pay a subscription fee, knowing it would be used on core advancements and things that don't have a direct ROI. 

I would quite happily leave DCS if a subscription model is introduced locking me out of my modules until I open my wallet every month to pay in USD from my currency and DCS asks for constant connection on my PvE experience.

Edited 3 hours ago by Czar66

[AndyJWest]

@aaronwhite, the ED/Razbam dispute 'blew up' over what ED claims is a breach of contract regarding Razbam allegedly using ED's intellectual property (the API etc) to develop content for a third party without EDs consent. Questions over whether Razbam were obliged to hand over source code only arose because of this.

[Aapje]

4 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:

It's you who don't get it. I'm talking about a situation where the software doesn't need to be changed at all. If all a given piece of software does is read a few values off a scientific instrument and write them into a text file, you don't give a damn if it runs on Windows 11 or on MS DOS. That's the point I'm making.

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:

Quote

I believe the main reason mathematically proven security is so rare and expensive is that the techbro way of "move fast and break things" is the normal way the programmers and execs think, and while it certainly gets results faster, it leads to programs that resemble a colander of roaches. If software engineers thought like railway engineers, we'd have a lot lower version numbers, quite a bit fewer features, and a damn sight more reliability. If we had more tools and resources for coding like that, as well as well defined environments that'd make it easier, we wouldn't be fighting a losing battle against cybercriminals. In fact, I believe that we'd see "hacking" gone as a distinct category from plain old espionage (which is all about social engineering).

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?

4 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:

The tech industry is obsessed with changes because changes make it money.

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.

4 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:

As long as the hardware itself holds up

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.

4 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:

and the task itself doesn't change or exceed the program's abilities (that's when you update stuff)

We constantly have customers begging for more features.

4 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:

Aka, the good old perfect solution fallacy. That you can't engineer out humans completely, so it's not worth securing everything else.

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?

4 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:

Also, it's quite possible to guard against some exploits by ensuring nobody can perform certain actions that have no legitimate use in a given context. Certain classes of attack, like ransomware, are only possible because the systems are not inherently secure.

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.

Quote

People are always part of the overall system and (again making the chain analogy) usually the weak link e.g. ransomware doesn't just appear but rather someone opened the door to it.

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.

[Aapje]

3 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:

The end result is, a bad initial product looks "innovative" because it gets constantly gets "improved" by removing holes that shouldn't have been there in first place.

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.

3 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:

That's my point, programmers like things that are flexible and general purpose, but freedom is counterproductive when it enables exploits that have to be explicitly guarded against.

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.

3 hours ago, Dragon1-1 said:

You can have a colander and a guy whose job is to spot and plug every hole in it, or you can have a solid metal pot. Which one is less likely to leak?

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.

Edited 1 hour ago by Aapje

[Dragon1-1]

1 hour ago, Aapje said:

We constantly have customers begging for more features.

Maybe what you work on can benefit from new features, but that's not the case with every computer system. In fact, it's a good question whether those features are really needed, or just really wanted. I'm pretty sure not all are in the former category.

1 hour ago, Aapje said:

How many people resisted the smartphone, and stuck an old IBM PC in their pocket instead?

Quite a few were fine with one of those indestructible old Nokias. I don't think you considered the question, how many of smartphone users actually need them? Some have now discovered that they, in fact, don't. Marketing can make you want anything with enough, well, marketing.

I was without a smartphone for a very long time, and when I got one, it was because I really did need some functionality that only a smartphone could provide. Although, I needed it because of an externally imposed fiat by people who assumed everyone had a smartphone.

1 hour ago, Aapje said:

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.

My house has steel doors with heavy duty locks, thick outer walls (mostly for heat insulation) and windows with reinforced glass. It's not a bunker, but it's far from easily breached. In fact, it's not possible for the kind of thief that targets private housing to get in before the security company's contractual response time. 

That's exactly what I'm talking about, too. The only way for a typical thief to make it inside would have been to scam his way in or steal a key. The way the house is designed provides inherent security. There are no exploits, no crawling in through an air vent or decoding the radio waves to open the door remotely (you can get in the garage that way, but the jalopy in there isn't actually worth stealing ). Likewise, buying any sort of stolen information gets you no closer to the keys. 

1 hour ago, Aapje said:

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.

Then it's not a cyberattack, it's a scam. I wasn't talking about those. Scamming individuals is another thing entirely, and is much older than computers.

32 minutes ago, Aapje said:

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.

Of course I understand what I'm asking for. In fact, I think all this software should have been written that way in first place. That's obviously not the case. All commonly used modern software has those issues (especially anything based around Unix). Almost all modern software is moving too fast. Most modern software breaks too many things because of that.

In fact, those issues actually start with hardware. Why should I need to restart my PC regularly when there had been VAXen that had an uptime of years, and mainframes on which you could install a patch to the running OS without turning off the system? The fact that the IBM PC was a crummy (but very modular) office machine running a hacked together CPM clone probably has something to do with it. It was never designed as something your life revolves around.

32 minutes ago, Aapje said:

The issue is that this in this fantasy of yours, there is not even a point in making that metal pot, because it doesn't do what people want. 

Again, I don't care what people want. I care about what people need. Again, the marketing department is there to make people want all the crap you're making and then ask for more. And then, the programmers wonder why people act entitled when requesting new features. In fact, a lot of people could do with a cleaner separation of wants and needs (but it's hard when every marketing department in the world is dedicated to muddling this line).

Edited 57 minutes ago by Dragon1-1

[Aapje]

2 hours ago, aaronwhite said:

My timeline may be off here, but my understanding of the situation (potentially biased as it may be) is that Razbam and ED were working together without any issue and it seems that during that time, Razbam never got around to providing their source code, which was confirmed by Razbam and ED.

Razbam seems to claim that even before this issue arose, ED was not always adhering to their (financial) obligations.

Also, all the information we have suggests that the obligation to hand over the source code only exists for newer contracts (and thus for newer modules), not the old contracts for the old modules. And this information includes a statement by VEAO (before the ED/Razbam fallout) who claimed that a large part of the reason they left was that they would be forced to hand over code and other materials for new modules. But even more importantly, it includes even ED's own statements after the VEAO departure, where they only said that they would require the source code for new modules.

2 hours ago, aaronwhite said:

my assumption following that is that ED eventually resorted to the only real trump card they held, which was stopping payments to Razbam and cutting off access to the DCS development system until that source code was provided.

No. You are making things up. This is not what either party is claiming, nor is it what any of the leaked stuff is claiming. There is no basis for what you say.

ED stopped payments and cut off access to DCS due to the Super Tucano thing. Nothing to do with not providing the source code for DCS modules.

2 hours ago, aaronwhite said:

That all lead to the court case

As far as we know, there is no court case.

2 hours ago, aaronwhite said:

It's a crap situation for everyone, and from my take, it's frustrating because it feels like Razbam seemingly get to walk away without much issue on their end.

Except for losing out on a quite a bit of money that they think that they are owed. That is clearly a big issue to them.

2 hours ago, aaronwhite said:

I hope ED can figure out a way to fix the situation, but the reality is, it just feels like they are stuck eating a lot of the blame while a third party developer gets to just go off and do their own thing. ED gets the burden of having to deal with angry users if updates break the Razbam modules

You ignore that a lot of people have expressed negative sentiment towards Razbam, and of course there is a lot of overlap between customers of DCS and other flight sims.

So it is very strange that you think that Razbam doesn't face any negative consequences (other than a major financial hit, which you don't seem to consider to be relevant for some bizarre reason).

2 hours ago, aaronwhite said:

But I'm personally most frustrated with Razbam, because until something comes out that tells me otherwise, I feel like they are the ones most responsible for possibly screwing me out of a module I enjoy. 

All those feelings and frustrations seem based on a completely incorrect assessment of the situation.

[Horns]

Adding this because I haven't seen it mentioned in the source code debate, apologies if it has and I missed it. As with all my posts, this is just my understanding: When ED first announced that they would change agreements to require the source code for third-party modules, my understanding was that that requirement was tied to the overall third-party agreement, not the agreement that is signed for a module; if that is true then the third-parties who were already developing for DCS when VEAO went under, Razbam being one, are not obliged to provide the source code for any modules they create in the future, as well as any modules they had created before.

If anyone has anything official that contradicts that please post it, the last thing I want to do is inflame the debate with incorrect information.

Edit: Please note that this would not prevent a third-party voluntarily submitting the source code or voluntarily signing a new third-party agreement.

Edited 45 minutes ago by Horns
As noted

[Silver_Dragon]

Why don't we stop dwelling on issues that have nothing to do with the dispute and focus on the facts? It seems that there's a part of the community here who believes that if everything isn't a conspiracy theory or if their point of view isn't correct, they have to invent a new theory every day to keep fueling this post...

It's been said repeatedly, even if this reaches 100,000 replies, legal processes are what they are, unless someone one day publishes something "confidential" and finds themselves facing a defamation lawsuit and a letter demanding to appear before a lawyer in court. The problem with "noise" is that it's only created to try to keep said "interference" from fading away and to ensure that some "monolithic points" don't die.

This is very tiring and honestly it's a permanent broken record... Honestly, those who defend the "pitchforks and torches" should think very seriously not only about the damage they are doing to the community, but also to the creators, because I wouldn't be surprised at all if many are silent precisely so that said community, if things don't fall within their parameters, will rush to kill with a knife by defaming someone on the networks... this way nobody feels like doing absolutely anything because it seems that we are becoming an authentically toxic community.

[Esac_mirmidon]

Because we love drama

[bfr]

50 minutes ago, Dragon1-1 said:

Of course I understand what I'm asking for. In fact, I think all this software should have been written that way in first place. That's obviously not the case. All commonly used modern software has those issues (especially anything based around Unix). Almost all modern software is moving too fast. Most modern software breaks too many things because of that.

In fact, those issues actually start with hardware. Why should I need to restart my PC regularly when there had been VAXen that had an uptime of years, and mainframes on which you could install a patch to the running OS without turning off the system? The fact that the IBM PC was a crummy (but very modular) office machine running a hacked together CPM clone probably has something to do with it. It was never designed as something your life revolves around.

Out of interest, can you name for me a platform or platforms that you consider to meet your bulletproof standard?