Hey Everyone,
First a little history lesson:
As you may know, the RepDev project started many months ago when a
friend on mine and I wrote the basis for what would later become
RepDev as an experimental Java program. We were both in high school at
the time. The project lay dormant for a while, but over the course of
a few months work at Community Financial Credit Union, which
graciously let me test and develop RepDev on their Symitar server, I
fleshed out the little "experiment" into a fully functional IDE. We
released the first public version in the Spring of 2007, even at this
early state, productivity of programmers using our program increased
tremendously!
After that, Ryan Schultz and Sean Delaney joined the team after
getting hired at CFCU, and we pushed out the 1.0 milestone release
right at the end of summer vacation. We polished out a lot of bugs,
and the feature set grew to be fairly mature. In the meantime, the
documentation was getting much better, and we even made a few short
video tutorials for how to use the program. Over this winter break, we
worked hard to get out version 1.5, which added Snippets, and
generally improved the user interface and experience.
Sure, RepDev has occasional issues, which mostly come from the
difficulty of testing in multiple environments. Symitar connections
are made different over direct types of interfaces, and with service
bureau's we relied solely on the input of volunteers to write the
correct code. We do our best to answer support emails as fast as
possible, and team members regularly read SMUG/SSCUG/the wiki to get
feedback from users and to fix the application.
Even so, over about the last year, we've managed to create a product
that offers more functionality and better support than Symitar's
solution. And guess what, it's free! I regularly get emails from
credit unions who have both POS and RepDev, and even after spending
thousands of dollars on POS, their programmers still prefer RepDev!
Our support system is also tremendous, many issues get a patch
released in a few days, a few severe bugs got patched in just hours!
Symitar takes weeks to patch basic, glaring, problems in their code!
Since this fall, I am a full time college student at Carnegie Mellon
University. Ryan is also a college student, but retains a part time CU
job where he can write and test minor patches to RepDev. Sean is even
younger, and is still in high school.
As students, who have worked hard making a small project into a fully
functional application, we expected nothing in return for our time.
RepDev is open source, we did this on purpose to show transparency, to
allow contributions from others, and to show people that we weren't
just trying to make a profit. Such open source software does however
rely on a model of donated time and money from other people to
survive. We've gotten quite a bit of donated time so far, in the form
of documentation written by other people, and even a few code patches.
This shows that there is definitely a large community interest in
RepDev, and I'm sure a good portion of you rely on using it every day.
The RepDev team would like to extend an invitation to it's user group,
that's you, to help us out, perhaps in the form of a monetary
donation.
We hope that you realize that the core RepDev team, which you have
come to know, are just a handful of college kids, just like any other
you may know. We don't require that you pay to use RepDev, nor do we
charge you for our time in answering support requests. However, we
kindly and humbly ask you to show your support by donating some money
to the team. We can't say that anyone of us is terminally ill, and
lives depend on your donations, but we CAN say that school is really
expensive, and perhaps with your donations would could afford some
toys to play with (read: computer hardware) or even less loans to pay
off after graduation.
We want you to see that an open project like this depends on
everyone's contribution. If you feel you can help us by writing some
code to fix a bug, or submitting some new feature for us to include,
that's excellent, and we promise that we look at every proposed code
addition with care. If you feel you can help by writing up some
documentation, that's great, and all the users will appreciate this.
If you want to help us out with a few bucks, know that we'll
definitely appreciate it. If you can help in more way than one, that's
even better!
If you are interested in donating after this little "speech", please
go to http://www.repdev.org and click on the Donate button (uses
Paypal) We've made the button be at the top of the page, so it's easy
to find ;) As an added benefit, we'll show the names of the last few
people to donate so you can brag to your friends that you support
Repdev! If your entire IT department would like to place a collective
donation, that's also excellent! (Think, even a few hundred dollars is
probably nothing in the scheme of things for an IT budget at a medium/large
business, but it's a significant scholarship payment for a college student!)
Thanks,
Jake and the RepDev Team
UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who donated already!
Also, RepDev 1.5.4 is coming out soon, it has many bug fixes and a few new things ;)
