> It's crazy how dependent a community can become on a piece of software and at the same time no one takes measures on preservation or open sourcing that software.
It's almost always because it's a labor of love and isn't worth the money.
Richard Douglass created Ballroom Dancing competition judging software because, as a competitor, he was wasting vast amounts of time with crappy judging and software (especially because a lot of software wouldn't deal well with garbage network connections).
https://www.douglassassociates.com/
It has roughly 300 uses per year. It charges roughly $1000 per use. That's about $300K per year for taking the support calls, managing the credit card bridge, and updating any features due to the OS makers breaking shit.
They have a plan to release the code when he passes. However, that probably isn't enough. It's likely nobody has the programming AND ballroom dance competition experience necessary to keep it going.
$300K/yr isn't a labor of love, it's skimming money from dues payers by being friends with corrupt leadership.
Lots of ballroom dancers are computer science students who could build this as a class project, and any programmer who knows a ballroom dancer can look at the paper slips and write software to automate it.
"Garbage network connections" are trivial to deal with with modern web app practices.
> Lots of ballroom dancers are computer science students who could build this as a class project, and any programmer who knows a ballroom dancer can look at the paper slips and write software to automate it.
Feel free to write it. People have been complaining that they want something better for quite a while (in both the US and EU). This project has been around since 1997(!) and someone could have replaced it over 25 years. And yet, no one has.
This isn't a technical problem and it absolutely stupefies me that people can't seem to wrap their heads around this.
You will field customer support calls. A lot of them. Ballroom competitions tend to have lots of non-tech people in them. You will field irate calls because something went wrong in the middle of a competition (even if none of it is your fault).
All for $1000 a competition. Not per competitor--per competition. Roughly speaking--the price of tickets from two competitors.
I look forward to seeing your replacement.
(Note: In fact there ARE other "more modern" solutions in the space. And they all say "Contact Us" when you start looking for pricing. Translation: we're going to charge way more than $1000).
I have no idea how much running a dance competition costs, but given that competitors expect to spend $450[1][2] on entry fees for a single competition I think that the organizers spending $1000 on software seems like a bargain?
> it's skimming money from dues payers by being friends with corrupt leadership
This is a really, really odd take.
Firstly, as pointed out above the cost of $1000 for a competition seems pretty reasonable.
Secondly, where do you get "being friends with corrupt leadership" from?
Most sports/recreation activities suffer from a huge lack of software. They are crying out for anything that helps them. If the leadership knows the author of the software, that isn't corruption that is a small community - and probably a good thing since it means the author probably listens to them.
I was on a comittee organising about 8 years back for the southern universities latin and ballroom competition, so not a professional one, but also not profit making.
The full day cost around £6200, that included music, demonstration couple, compare, 6 judges, food, first aiders, venue hire, officials, trophies, medals, programmes, decorations. We then charged around £12.50 entry for ~500 students.
The national competition for universities happens in blackpool every year and I imagine the costs are around 3-4x that considering the venue and number of officials. And unless we got discounts for being universities, or the judges are paid less, i imagine it costs at least £28,000 to put on a big professional competition.
In a comparable venue to the winter gardens in blackpool
What an amazing jump to go from software that is clearly desirable enough that people are paying for it to "skimming money" and "corrupt leadership". To take issues THAT STILL EXIST in 80%+ of software and call them "trivial".
Yes, the tools to build this product and make it function obviously exist. If you can do it cheaper, then do it and undercut him!
I don't think you want to handle billing, support (for VERY non-tech savvy groups) and build and customize the software fulltime for <300k revenue (not profit!). Especially not at the "$1k a client project" price. Anyone can crank out a webform, very few people can integrate software into a client and have the client continue to want to pay them!
Accusing someone, without merit, of skimming and corruption is bordering in the libel territory. Doing it in this case is also rude and shows a lack of experience.
It's almost always because it's a labor of love and isn't worth the money.
Richard Douglass created Ballroom Dancing competition judging software because, as a competitor, he was wasting vast amounts of time with crappy judging and software (especially because a lot of software wouldn't deal well with garbage network connections). https://www.douglassassociates.com/
It has roughly 300 uses per year. It charges roughly $1000 per use. That's about $300K per year for taking the support calls, managing the credit card bridge, and updating any features due to the OS makers breaking shit.
They have a plan to release the code when he passes. However, that probably isn't enough. It's likely nobody has the programming AND ballroom dance competition experience necessary to keep it going.