A New Beginning

[odin]

As many of the community know, this project has had a few stumbling blocks and hardships. Starting with the move from Galleon Dragon to Fellippe Heitor, running the project, the limited funding, and technical difficulties, it has been a stressful few years. With the future in mind, we have decided to enlist the help of a business professional to help run the business side of QB64.

I want to be very clear; there are no current nor future plans to make QB64 a commercial or paid product. It will stay open source and free. Robert Carter of Carter Enterprises has come in as CEO of the project. You may also know Robert from the forum and Patreon as RCcola1987.

This move will provide better funding, support, and growth opportunities.
We got the QB64 project registered as a USA company and now have much greater protection from bad actors by bringing in Robert.

Fellippe will stay on as a volunteer community manager and front-end developer. Most interactions in the community will still be with the people you have already dealt with, and no member of the team is leaving.

By the time the community sees this, we will have already started the move of the website, forum, wiki, and inform sites to a new platform and have begun to make enhancements to the home page. This will resolve a few long-standing issues with our current host and future plans.

We have also added additional security to the project by making sure no one person can take down or block access to the project. In addition, there is now a plan to deal with the loss of a core team member.

Finally, we are adding a news section to the homepage. This will allow the QB64 Team to keep the members of the QB64 community up to date on what we are doing.

We have big plans for the future and need the communities’ help to make it happen. We all want to personally thank the QB64 community and the greater QuickBasic community for their support throughout the years.

[STxAxTIC]

As a founding member of qb64.org and team member and librarian yada yada, I had zero idea this was coming. Shadow government confirmed.

Jokes aside, what's this mean from a "business" point of view? A QB64 mug in every cupboard?

[johnno56]

Anything that will promote QB64 is a great idea... Very exciting... Mug? What mug?

[Statsman1]

We have big plans for the future and need the communities’ help to make it happen.

Looking forward to hearing what those plans are.

[Qwerkey]

We wish the new team the same degree of amazing success as has happened under Fellippe and beforehand under Galleon.

[wiggins]

The fact that QB64 exists and runs so well is a major accomplishment.  Thanks to everyone involved.  The community is amazing and has been very helpful to me.  Steve McNeil provided me with some code to address issues which has been a real life saver.  I would love to see QB64 produce smaller code and for QB64 to run on an M1 processor.  QB64 currently produces C code, but it would be a great teaching too if the C code it produced look more like this example:

#include <stdio.h>
int main() {
   // printf() displays the string inside quotation
   printf("Hello, World!");
   return 0;
}

I am not clear what a "CEO" will bring to this project, but I look forward to seeing what direction you go.  Hopefully, this is not the beginning of the end.

[RhoSigma]

• Round 1 -- early development by Galleon
• I found and use it since v0.922 in 2010, when I need to run my QBasic stuff on Windows 7
• unbelievable it's 12 years already, it was before DECLARE LIBRARY, _OFFSET and _MEM, things we use today as they've ever been there
• Round 2 -- transition from SDL to OpenGL
• a long and rocky way to get all (most) of the caused regressions sorted out, some still remain
• a couple of my own bugfixes and enhancements got implemented into the language
• we also got a new web page and forum and thanks to social media and YouTube a broader visibility in the public -- Thanks Fellippe for all the cool video tutorials and podcasts
• Round 3 -- Going further into eternity...
• we get more professional at the administrative organization of the QB64 Project
• we surely will further enhance it and kill bugs
• I'm proud to be part of it...

[STxAxTIC]

This whole thing stinks like shit unless someone opens a window. I speak not just for myself, but for whomever hit me up privately to "please say something". (You know who you are, and there's more than one.) Just some random points, these aren't all of them nor are they in any kind of order:

1) Why doesn't the CEO make himself an account and chat with us? Forums or Discord. Can I look up his ongoing interest in QB64?

2) Has anyone besides Fellippe ever met this guy? Were there competitors? What was the process that led up to this transition?

3) What is this guy the CEO *of* exactly? The website? The compiler? Anything that says QB64 on it? His own C:\ drive only?

4) Does anyone remember when Walter tried this same thing and then all we did was laugh? Does anyone who remembers that moment enjoy the taste of their own shoe right now?

5) If I go and buy   q b 6 4 . n e t   , or qb64.com, and then fork the repo and call it my own, can I be a CEO too?

Some people close to Fellippe - and I don't mean just me - want more of an explanation for this.

[bplus]

What say @FellippeHeitor and @luke of this?

[luke]

As long as someone is paying the hosting bill each month I'm not particularly fussed who it is. This is exactly the kind of thing I don't want to care about in a project that's supposed to be for fun.

[bplus]

As long as someone is paying the hosting bill each month I'm not particularly fussed who it is. This is exactly the kind of thing I don't want to care about in a project that's supposed to be for fun.

Understandable, but there is some fear of power those persons may naturally feel entitled (CEO) to impose, that wonderful fun could be lost, even for the entitled.

Last I heard from @FellippeHeitor, funding was fine (I have offered to help if he got stuck), so we would not have to depend solely on someone,

Of course money is not only issue, seems to me there is increased concern about security of forum and QB64 entity. And of course for security reasons hard to discuss openly.

Also not fun, calling in professionals and bringing in the out of control changes and costs that usually come with them.

[FellippeHeitor]

We're happy, the changes are positive. I posted the original message above as odin. Let's keep having fun.

Ryan is both here in the forum and on Discord (I linked his profile when the announcement was posted there). Again, welcome, Ryan.

[bplus]

Hi @FellippeHeitor how do we know RC here at forum, by what @ name?

BTW I use to work for RC Cola when they bought up Arby's to have some liquid assets, they later liquidated the company stores but I was long gone before that. Fun loosely based facts :)

[Qwerkey]

@FellippeHeitor ( @odin )'s initial post here gives Robert's forum ID as @RCcola1987 but, as @bplus says, this ID does not exist at the forum (this is Robert's ID on Discord).  So, we'll need to have Robert's forum ID for contact here as well.  (odin:  you gods really ought to be infallible).

[bplus]

@Qwerkey

I did notice in "a new section to the homepage" we can post messages. But it looks like a special log-in for that, as it asks me to log-in when I already am here at forum.