richmond62 wrote: ↑Sun Mar 29, 2026 8:01 pm
continue using it as the workshop where Create is worked on
The company may do that: but whether they are going to continue licensing it to others is another question.
What conjecture about any future doesn't involve unknowns?
I'm just looking at the pragmatic aspects from a business owner perspective:
What they sell is an engine, where license enforcement happens.
Any GUI app needs a UI, so the engine comes with a set of stack files which provide that UI.
For first decade of this engine, everyone used the rather bare-bones MC IDE. Then Crossworlds made a better one, became RunRev, made it better still, while some of us had already evolved our own tooling around MC and continued using that. Along the way countless other tools have popped up. And now the engine owner is making another one, Create.
What they sell is an engine. It does them no harm - and much good - if people invest in using that engine to tailor their workflow with their own UI stacks.
As long as the engine can open stack files, it can open stack files.
Any GUI, even tooling, are just stack files.
The complications that would be needed to invent some mechanism that tries to prevent opening some stack files while allowing others would be an endless drain on resource - and to what end?
Why spend engineering *reducing* the assessable market, by preventing people from doing one of the most valuable reasons xTalks are great, the ability to tailor the workflow?
If one needs to fixate on Henny Penny scenarios, the bigger risk of to the engine itself. It's expensive to maintain, and while I can appreciate the through-line of moving up the value chain - from hobbyists in the first decade, to indies in the second, now focusing on enterprise - the global business landscape is always fraught with uncertainty and change.
Nothing is guaranteed in any aspect of life. That this engine has granted us 35 years is pretty remarkable in itself. It'd be great if it went on another 35 years, but so much changes in computing it's hard to see beyond technology's short event horizon.
So in any given moment, we just make that most of what's on hand, hope for the best, remain flexible when life rolls snake eyes rather than the box cars we'd hoped for.