@jayfella I personally think you have done a great job in your contributions to the community. My company depends on jme for several platforms we have developed, and I believe that it was been well worth donating to get the jme store running, which was all thanks to you. I will continue to donate and support the project.
2 Likes
It seems you guys are under the impression that i should just accept everything and don’t speak my mind. Remember that i am just a volunteer like you.
I’ve never tried to impose something to anybody. I’ve never said “this is what it is and you must accept it”. I just voice my opinion and say what i disagree and what i agree with, and for those that say “talking but not doing”, i’ve also been ready to help whenever needed, but i’ve also been told that my opinion is worth nothing and some of my stuff has been rejected for things i believe aren’t based on objectivity.
And for the next people that is already replying with some bs about handling money, please note that this was never a problem for me. I’ve already said many times that the problem was about the things that were promised in the page by this “jmonkey” entity. I wanted to know if i was promising something, because that was something i had to honour, and since, apparently, my opinion is worth nothing, i wanted clarity on who was promising what.
Let’s make an example… do you think it would be NORMAL to promise things on behalf of others? This wasn’t the purpose of the page? Right i know, that’s why i said it should be made clear.
Let’s make another example for those who still don’t understand… how do you think “jmonkey” can promise anything about the store, if jmonkey doesn’t have the source of said store? How am i supposed to honour this promise?
Maybe you don’t realize that when a group promises something, every single person of said group should work to honor the promise.
You don’t like this? I’m sorry for your feelings, but as you said my opinion is worth nothing… so what is the problem again?
2 Likes
If there is no one who owns the jmonkey repository and copyright to the name still connected to this anymore then there is no other choice but to fork and rebrand it. You can tie into the jmonkey brand like @jayfella is doing but without owning the assets of this its futile and will die when he does or if he decides to move on.
The project has grown enough that it is now past the idea stage and can only succeed as a legal business entity, whatever form that may take. The bad thing is that costs money, and time and only someone who is tied financially can be expected to do that. Whoever owns the business can transfer it to someone else, apply for grants, accept donations whatever.
This would require the community to agree to moving to the forked engine. You cannot expect someone to put their time and money into this and accept all the risks for nothing. By nothing I mean no assets, or financial stream to support it.
These things usually have a natural flow where the person who starts the project stays involved and creates the business entity. Now that they have abandoned it the community must decide how this should go forward.
Edit: The best option still is that whoever does own the repo and jmonkey name hand it over like it was last time.
Maybe I’m wrong about this, but I don’t really understand the logic in discussing business legalities with the entire community. The only people that really know are those employed in that area.
Democracy is great and all but 99.9% of the community including myself are not qualified to offer sound legal advice.
In my opinion these things need to be discussed by a group of people that are involved in its development, not everybody. And those individuals alone need to ensure that every legality is being adhered to.
I just don’t understand why we’re asking people that don’t understand business how to run a business. It’s not normal.
2 Likes
I disagree. I definitely would still donate, as I expect many others would also (the only reason I haven’t already is because these last few months have been a non-stop zoo for me and I haven’t taken the time to do it yet). There’s zero cause to suspect financial impropriety as long as the server bills get paid. Regarding transparency (as you mentioned in another post) I see two easy ways to handle this:
-
Post an occasional list of expenses, leftover balance, and Patreon income. We can all see Patreon’s income report, so the numbers either match up or they don’t.
-
Switch from Patreon to OpenCollective, which takes care of all of that automatically for you. They handle payments and reporting, so there is no chance for anyone to claim impropriety or missing money.
Now, regarding your vision for jME moving forward: as I see it, all except 2 individuals in the community have wholeheartedly subscribed to your vision. The remaining 2 have expressed some concerns over implementation details, but don’t apparently disagree with the overall direction. That’s not a dead vision; that’s a surprisingly viable vision. At the beginning of all this I expected you to get more pushback than you have so far. Going off what @Darkchaos said, it’s rare to make decisions that don’t meet with substantial pushback from just about every source imaginable. Your vision is doing mighty well in that department.
Now, my 2 cents on what everyone has been tossing around. I see no case for forming a corporation or foundation for jME at this point. We’re too small, and that’s a major undertaking. I don’t see the legalities being an issue here - jME already exists and holds copyrights to the code. Who is jMonkeyEngine? Us. This group. We democratically gave James the go-ahead to do what he did. He’s been great about checking in and showing us where everything is going and what’s happening and asking for feedback and input. Let me remind everyone, by a strict definition of “democracy” the vote carries by a 51% support base. We’ve given him far more than 51% support. As long as whoever manages the Patreon/OpenCollective/bank/whatever accounts takes care of their own tax situation at home, we’re all fine - the liability is on that volunteer, not the group as a whole.
So, TLDR: jMonkeyEngine is a fantastic and unique project with a lot of talent behind it. It would be a shame to see it die here over a truly pointless quarrel. We have 3 options as I see it:
-
Press ahead with @jayfella’s plans, as we decided previously.
-
Press on without @jayfella’s work & leadership, as we were before, and slowly die off as @pspeed talked about.
-
Kill ourselves off quickly by insisting on specific legalities & legal entities & forks & arguments.
Many open source projects have died by 2 & 3. Let’s learn from history and not join them. James is impeccably trustworthy, and he has put the time and effort in to volunteer for a difficult but crucially necessary task that we very much need. He’s given us a great way forward, and most of us have wholeheartedly supported him in that. Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and press on with it - we really have nothing to lose and a whole lot to gain.
5 Likes
Unless @jayfella owns the repo and copyright hes open to lawsuits. If he runs the money through his own bank, hes toast and could easily be bankrupted without the permission of the owner.
No one can legally present themselves to get free support or anything else only the owner can.
Whoever owns the repo and copyright may decide to be an a-hole one day and make an example of him.
The best route is to get the owner to turn this over to him or whomever. Whatever happens after that doesn’t matter as much then.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I’m not sure that there even legally is an owner to turn it over at this point. We have a copyright that refers to a project, not a person, and a group of people behind the project who have at least largely agreed to go this route. Also, the copyright is a non-issue as long as license terms are complied with, the trademark is the issue at hand and I’m not sure that even that is a legal liability - at least in the US, if you abandon a non-registered trademark my understanding is you lose your claim to it - and the trademark still is associated with a group, not an individual or a business. I’m not at all sure there even is an owner at this point, beyond the “jME community.”
You raise a good point about the banking. In the US that’s easily avoided via an LLC - typical fees for a registration + legal agent are several hundred dollars per year. As long as finances are not co-mingled nobody can touch the owner’s personal assets. I’m not sure if this is an issue with things like OpenCollective though - I believe they perform 100% of the money handling for you, at which point if I’m wrong and there is an owner then donors are just paying for someone else’s stuff, which isn’t illegal.
Yeah, exactly.
I think this is E.U. and that is a real but cheek clincher.
Probably not helpful for me to speculate.
Hope he can pull something off.
1 Like
I just looked up OpenCollective, and they offer 2 options: connect everything to your legal entity’s bank accounts, or, if you don’t have a legal entity or for some reason can’t connect your accounts, you hire a “fiscal host” for ~5%-10% fees on the transactions. This strikes me as the best way to avoid individual liabilities - they have fiscal hosts for the US and the EU.
In order to save some circlejerking, I’m going to reiterate: Jay has said that he has an accountant and has ran the whole setup by him/her and apparently got a go-ahead. So I’d leave the bussiness side of things to Jay’s accountant, as Jay stated multiple times he has things covered, and focus on how we can improve the engine, get more users, etc.
Cheers 
5 Likes
So he has the permission to apply for free hosting and matching funds at github?
For guthub if you can get people to send in requests like I did he can get added.
You would only need 21 people paying $20 a month for 12 months to grab the free 5k.
Edit: The only catch is the repo owner has to apply.
Edit: Jays repo would work I would think. The one for the web site.
I dont know what happened on Discord (didnt even know there was a discord)… but the Software Store was the most exciting feature JME has had for a long time, in my opinion.
The examples on JME’s github are boring, especially to amateur developers looking for a starting point, because there’s no visual media to show what the code does, etc. etc… The Software Store changed that. It could certainly bring in new users if it were promoted by the community. (Maybe linking back from their projects on other forums, dev blogs, youtube, etc.)
I wholeheartedly felt like JME was just about to make a major comeback… I hope the admin/volunteer issues can be resolved and everything is restored.
6 Likes
All services have been restored.
Regarding the store, I backed up the database but didn’t backup the images directory, so I’ve had to resubmit my own pages and lost the others. Not the greatest news but not the end of the world, either. There were only a small handful of submissions, and at least this was caught early.
Everything else should be working as expected.
7 Likes
Oh, wow. I didn’t know it was this bad.
When core devs who enjoy our utmost respect start talking like this… I think it’s a good time to start thinking about bailing out!
We’ve been developing our game on top of JME for over 3 years now, but I think I’m gonna start putting some serious resources into finding out how difficult it would to port our whole code base over to Godot.
Just… Wow… !
1 Like
That would be an entire codebase re-write. Alternatively… we could all devote some (non-zero) resources to helping out with jME.
3 Likes
Guys, the whole reason behind the rejuvenation was to improve it.
Services are secure for the foreseeable future. Online footprints are being expanded and improved. Bug and feature bounties are in the pipeline, as is selling and buying assets on the store.
The future is bright. I think virtually everybody is on board with that vision now and with a little patience it will begin to pay off.
I guess tensions are this high because we are aware this is a reality, but the engine is extremely competent with a great team and community. It needed a team leader like @erlend_sh to monitor and maintain the team and PR. It was left too long, admittedly, but I have every confidence that we can pull through without too much of a scrape and be the better for it.
My personal opinion would be to carry on as normal. There’s no immediate concern.
10 Likes
Same!
Wow… I just saw the new webpage. It’s fantastic! Glad to see things have cooled a bit.
As for funding w/hosting etc, from conversations in the past, I didn’t think it was really a big issue. I’ve (and many others have) offered my own resources to help out with JME in the past before ending in some rather, erm, harsh rejections… but the offer still stands. For whatever it’s worth, OpenCollective sounds perfect, if that’s an option.