[qebab]

I'm going to take this opportunity to say a few things about Munin, since some people seem to think that Munin is inherently something very tightly bound to (and only interesting for) Ascendancy.

I first saw Munin in round 19 or something like that, at which point I had never programmed before and this whole superduperadvanced IRC bot that made my calculations for me instantaneously was fantastic. It really made the game easier for me. Munin is probably pretty tightly bound to Ascendancy, mostly because it's such an integral part of the community there (And as jester mentioned, that's what has him sticking about in the community). At this point I actually got quite interested in programming, and I asked jester how I could go about writing an IRC bot, and he actually linked me to the code, which was out in public on this very forum.

I mean, what happened? Not many alliances that put their high tech secrets out for everyone to have. But jester did. It wasn't trivial to set up, and I didn't have linux at the time, so I couldn't really make it run, but I looked at some of the code, and I was able to program a bot of my own (That was actually in use a couple of rounds in that other game). Obviously, Munin was more than just the hugely useful IRC bot to me. It actually helped me get starting with something that has later turned out to be 'the right career' path for me.

It's also running in a whole bunch of galaxy channels, not to speak of the public #transcendancy channel, where everyone can use it. I'd hazard that most people who have been around for a while have now used, or seen Munin used at some point.

The problem is though, that development has been pretty much closed to everyone but those in the Ascendancy community, which is really not what it should be like. It's open source after all, getting more people to help out is a good thing. It makes sense for such a project to have an official channel where people can come with suggestions, questions, or just to help out. In my opinion, this project is so useful that it deserves that.

You guys need to understand that even if what jester wanted, or asked for, seems selfish and shit, he's using his spare time to develop this fantastic tool that he actually gives away for free, and now he wants a place where everyone, instead of only the people in #ascendancy can come with feedback, suggestions, questions and discussions. That's not selfish. If anything, it's the opposite.

Thanks for Munin, jester!