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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5685611" data-attributes="member: 82106">Speaking as a developer... Yeah, you'd think that hiring the Maptool guys might work, except they are all really highly paid developers already. You've got a team of 5 or 6 core guys, each of which can scoff at $100k a year offer. They aren't coming cheap. I'm pretty sure WotC isn't paying anything like what they would need to pay to get the best of the best.Beyond that there's a big difference between "yeah, we mess with this on our weekends and when we feel like, and someday feature X will get in there and bug Y will go away, and if person A on platform M can't seem to get it to work, well we'll look into it." and commercial software with commercial support and commercial software reliability, written to something resembling a schedule and conforming to something like a spec. Ironically the Maptool community probably can overall proceed faster, but they have no agenda. There's not some update they are aiming to get out. They're not promising a specific feature, or needing to get some tweak done for the release of some new rules. Management just can't live with "stuff will get done someday" and "dunno what that will cost, we'll tell you when we do it". The thing is too, a piece of software developed as a hobby doesn't have to be designed with some kind of business strategy in mind. Maptool has NO good way to import anyone else's data (people have cobbled together macros to parse things like stat blocks, sort of). Sure, maybe it can be added, and then again maybe not, or maybe not at a reasonable cost. Nobody had to be paid to sit down and map that out and make sure it could happen, which is exactly the sort of things that keep WotC guys busy I'm sure. That and fighting fires. People are paying for the software, you GOTTA fight those fires RIGHT NOW, drop everything, put the fire out, get back to work, lost a week. Free Software is just a different world from commercial software. There's a reason why things like OO and Linux and Apache are darned popular, because IF you do it right you can have some of the advantages of free and some of the advantages of commercial. I dunno if WotC could ever do that though. The whole thing is so bound up in their IP that it is unlikely.</blockquote>

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