VRTK Developer Calls It Quits, Cancels Fourth Edition

[kcarbotte]

The developer behind the open-source Virtual Reality Toolkit (VRTK) cancelled its plans to release the fourth version of its popular developer tools. The lone developer known as The Stonefox pulled their Patreon page on January 1 and called it quits.

VRTK Developer Calls It Quits, Cancels Fourth Edition : Read more

 

[dstarr3]

Uhhh... This article was not ready for showtime.

 

[bit_user]

Was the developer actually expecting to collect very much revenue from donations, for such niche product?

It's good that it was open source and that they're not taking down the Github page, but for them to rule out a v4 basically means they don't intend to grant anyone else permission to work on the project. And that feels a bit childish.

They could have just put out a call for a new maintainer.

 

[bddckr]

Was the developer actually expecting to collect very much revenue from donations, for such niche product?

It's good that it was open source and that they're not taking down the Github page, but for them to rule out a v4 basically means they don't intend to grant anyone else permission to work on the project. And that feels a bit childish.

They could have just put out a call for a new maintainer.

Thanks for your uninformed opinion!

- The donated money was for the community to pay artists, developers and others to work on new features.
- It was open-source from day one.
- The maintainer always intended it to be free to get more people access to development as a whole and to ease VR development.
- The maintainer has been asking for community help since day one, but even small contributions were nowhere to be seen pretty much, so not enough involvement to even think about additional maintainers.
- It's MIT licensed, the maintainer can't prevent anyone from working on it.
- All the maintainer stated is that his repo won't get v4 - someone else can do however they chose.

tl;dr: The community always knew that it's gonna end up like this - the sole maintainer has been asking for help for more than a year now. Without any contributions in the first place calling a new maintainer is way off.

 

[grimfox]

That's a bummer, but not a surprise. He wasn't earning enough from the Patreon to make it a full time gig. And there wasn't a lot of support in the community to aid part time development. It's a shame to see a talented developer call it quits like that. I wonder how many devs using the kit were contributing to the Patreon. Hopefully someone will recognize this guys talent and float him a job offer for a platform or development.

 

[bit_user]

Thanks for your uninformed opinion!

Hey, I was just commenting on the info presented in the article - seems like that's your real issue, yet you lash out at me. Or maybe you just needed an excuse to whine.

- It was open-source from day one.
- The maintainer always intended it to be free to get more people access to development as a whole and to ease VR development.
- It's MIT licensed, the maintainer can't prevent anyone from working on it.

I didn't say otherwise. Good job with reading comprehension.

I'm sorry nobody supported your project. Better luck next time. If I'm honest, it seems like you've still got more to learn about how to run successful open source projects.