Crossroads

It's been a while since I last wrote a post, but I've been quite busy. First of all, in a week or two I will release the first, official beta version of Descend. It will be quite an event, because I made several attempts at writing it in the last eight years and I've never come that close to finishing it. In case you missed the earlier post about Descend, it's a program for drawing 3D surfaces (and curves) based on parametric equations. It's sort of a conceptual project, so it's not going to have a lot of features, but it aims at being very fast and producing high quality graphics.

Another thing that has been bugging my mind in the past few months is the future of WebIssues. I came to the point where it simply doesn't make a lot of sense to put more effort into it without actually getting something back. I made lots of analysis how to make money from this project, especially focusing on controversies around the open core model. I came to the conclusion that the best solution is to create a specialized, commercial system based largely on WebIssues and dedicated to a narrow group of users, while keeping WebIssues itself a free, powerful, general purpose tool for bug tracking, project management, etc., which it already is, and letting it continue to evolve.

The idea is not new; I've been thinking about profiting from WebIssues since I started working on version 1.0 three years ago, but now I have a much clearer vision of what I'm trying to achieve. Most of all, I don't want to be an outsourced developer for the rest of my life. I got as far as I could in this area in terms of both allowance and career development. I need to change something sooner or later and this could be a great opportunity to do that. Of course, I could just get a highly paid job and forget about all this open source shenanigans; but in the end, what you achieve in life is a matter of much more than just money. So as always I'm choosing the harder way, and it's going to take time, but I think it's going to be worth the effort.

At the moment, however, I'm already planning to start working on version 1.1. The updated roadmap includes a long description field, roles and groups, LDAP authentication and project summary. I have an initial design for some of these features, others may be added as well, the roadmap is not closed yet. I will be posting more information on webissues.mimec.org and might even release the first beta version by the end of the year, but I'm not enforcing any deadlines on me. As long as I do it for free, it's nothing more than a hobby, and as such it competes for my time with other hobby projects, including Descend, Saladin, and especially the new update for Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition that's coming out soon :).