WCESRP is different. It was done poorly. Jumper treated us like he expected us to bow to him as our new God because he had set up a web site with a form and spent two years writing an e-mail.
I'm very much biased on this matter, since I worked on WCESCRP. Nonetheless, I really don't think it was done poorly. Yes, it took us three months to write the letter, but we had our reasons. We knew what the answer would be - NO. As Kris just said, OSI's company policy is no secret. What we were trying to do is to provide such good arguments that at the end of the day, David Swofford would have no explanation for the "no". Would he still say no? Most likely, but there was also a chance that if faced with such a situation, he would actually go and discuss this with the higher-ups. That was our only chance - to show them that this IS a good idea, that they really can benefit from this. Finding enough arguments for that does take time - perhaps it shouldn't have taken three months of time, but we were a fan project after all
.
Also, I don't agree with what you said about David Swofford "going out of his way" to reply to us. Don't get me wrong though
. I most certainly do not think that he was unprofessional or rude, and I certainly do not feel angry about his reply - as you said, it's the way the world works. Still, he wasn't going out of his way, he was simply doing his job. Had he not bothered replying to our letter, that
would have been unprofessional, don't you think? Besides, I genuinely believe that releasing the source code would have been as beneficial for Origin as for us, so I think that they had good reasons to read and consider what we said.
BTW, Maverick's editorial is not a testament to anything WCESCRP-related, because he had nothing to do with WCESCRP
.