As some of you may have noticed, netlabs.org stopped the contract with Vladest for UNIAUD and WarpVision development. This was not an easy decision for me and I would like to give some of the reasons behind this step.

About three years ago I decided to hire a fulltime programmer for UNIAUD and WarpVision, to make sure we had good progress on those projects. We decided to go for Vladest because he worked on both projects already. The monthly salary of more than 500 Euro was payed by usergroups, private sponsors and mainly by myself, which means my very own money. During the past years I spent around 20’000 Euro out of my own pocket for netlabs.org, a big part of that money went into those two projects.

Even as a Swiss this was a lot of money and I can not and do not want to continue like that. Besides this, I was not really happy about the progress of the two projects either, so I decided to stop the labour contract with Vladest. Next to those there were other reasons as well, but I will not ellaborate on those here.

This basically means that there is nobody working on either of these projects right now. Source code of these projects is in Subversion and both projects did get built by other people from time to time so the codebase is there, even if it might not compile that easy.

So what is next? To be honest, I don’t know. In my opinion UNIAUD is an important project, maybe more important than WarpVision. So the question now is if anyone is willing to invest money into it? Are users ready to pay for a sound driver for eComStation? If so, how should that be organized?

I welcome you to join a discussion about that, please post your ideas to the netlabs.org community mailinglist which is also available at gmane.org, so you can contribute using your web browser, news reader or mail client!

In case we find a constructive and working solution we might hire Vladest on a project base with clear goals, but I won’t do that alone anymore.

Adrian Gschwend, founder & webmaster of netlabs.org