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Message: <blockquote data-quote="UngainlyTitan" data-source="post: 5279132" data-attributes="member: 28487">Totally agree, as one of those rural dwelling peopleYes and no, I reckon the Maptools guys had some prior relevant experience or at a need to develope the relevant experience.If you look at map tools there are a number of distinct developer skillsets in evidence. There is the stantard GUI (the menus, file open/save dialogs and so foth ) that any developer could knock together.There is the macro parser which took a bit of work but most developers should be able to learn but can be tricky to program but are bread and butter to a lot of developers.There is the map drawing layers which are probably built on top of a specalist library. These things are somewhat specalised and many commercial business application developers may never use in the course of their careers. Gaining proficiency with that library is probably a lot of work.Finally there is the networking bit. Now again the libariries are there but getting it to work as smoothly as Maptools would indicate to me that there is a networking guru involved. (if he/she was not in the beginning I suspect they are now<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />)So it is not a trivial application, and while open source guys in their spare time can take the approach that we will release it when its  done that usually does not work in a commercial environment where there are budget constraints.The other problem with commercial software development in my experience is that a company with little or no prior experience of software development putting together a team (or even tendering it out) have very limited conception of what they want.They may have a high level concept but no real ideas on the details of the execution.So a spec is put together, everyone signs off on it and a project plan is drawn up.Then the team starts doing their stuff and an early alpha appears. This is the first time the user seen this kind of thing and it will be wrong.They will want a million and one changes, some because the developers simply do not understand the business, some because some executive wants to stick his oar in and make waves but most because they will make it a much better product but the client did not understand fully what they wanted until they could play with a working application.The deadline arrives and the application is half finished, then what?In my experience, if you have a client with no prior sotfware development experience and a new team that never worked together then very likley you will have to build the application twice, once to find out what you want and once to get it to work the way you want. I very much suspect this is what happened to WoTC.If you have an established team that have done this before, then you have a good chance of a product but if the client is green it willl still take longer than you though and a lot more money than you expected.</blockquote>

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