I really don’t understand this attitude Alex. You and your team’s work has been always appreciated. We never took things for free, we already purchased a dozen and a half of Android licenses and the on-premise licensing module for honest money.
We look forward in the near future (literally following weeks) for 2 expansion projects having about 30-40 Android clients each, and we also plan to get the player hardware from you (dsdevices) - with the honest intention to financially support the project.
I was always expecting that my observations are taken as constructive criticism, where you could take and see, or maybe even consider that there are multiple different scenarios where this great open source project is being used. Enforcing various things down the throat of people with no way to turn back doesn’t seem to be something too easy to accept for use cases where certain decisions have been already made knowing the features and functions of the software at that time. See some examples below:
One of the best things of Xibo up to 1.7.9 was that it was HTTP-only, we could break any walls with that. Employing XMR mandatory (because otherwise we lose basic functionality like screenshots) was a hit under the belt. It would have been much more correct if previous functionality was kept untouched and XMR would just add extra, if somebody is unable to XMR that due to various reasons, why not respect that?
Also the same with dockerization and stating immediately that non-dockered installs won’t be supported anymore. Again a hit under the belt, upgrade process is not as simple as the docs say (re-installing from scratch seems simpler than upgrading). I can understand that docker makes things simpler for you, but I am really sad to see that door has been suddenly shut (as officially stated) for custom installs (and it’s plain to see that documentation to have a custom install is next to non-existing - I don’t call searching various posts across the forums as proper documentation). Many installs use the same webserver where Xibo is located for many parallel things, like serving HLS video content to the same players, and other web-content which will be displayed by the same Xibo clients, but as embedded webpages (simply because Xibo’s own editor in the CMS can’t solve the customers special requests).
Things seem to change around Xibo with 1.8, and I’m not talking about features literally, but about the way things are approached. Up to 1.7(.9) features were more thoroughly tested (remember good old Launchpad times before 1.7), user interface elements were properly designed and written down, user feedback was better appreciated. Now I see tons of features appearing but all undocumented (not expecting a separate doc, but maybe just a sentence in the UI), literally just “thrown in” having the user run into confusion (remember my post about HLS media type not working in Android, I had to report it in the forums, and got the answer that HLS module was never intended to work under Android, that is a Windows-only feature - and I should simply try the Local video module - how on Earth was I supposed to know that from? The HLS module has nowhere a single word that it’s intended for Windows only, and Local video either doesn’t say a word that it supports HLS. All the documentation says is local video files and (maybe) certain RTP streams, (may I quickly note here that while HLS does work somehow in Local video media type, it’s far away from being something stable). Things like this making the product harder to use. And taking away your precious time too - as if they were properly done, the majority of the questions wouldn’t even appear on the forums and you wouldn’t have to instruct everybody one by one that “this has been already discussed many times” demoralizing the whole community etc. Such things didn’t happen in the past.
I’m really trying not to offend anyone here. But I am posting this in a hope that this is also taken as constructive criticism. We are really trying to use OpenSource software everywhere, not only taking it for free, but trying to give something back in exchange: our experience and feedback (to make the project better for others) and purchasing products to financially support those working in it. Of course could be easy to grab some windoze with an activator and use your WIndows-based client and hide away using it ‘as is’ - but we don’t do that. We’re trying to play open here, and take the professional approach - which we believe is better for everyone: the Xibo project, the end-users and us.