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 2 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 2 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 1 hour 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 1 hour 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.