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SLikeSoft company changes

Posted: Tue Jan 05, 2021 12:38 am
by Luke1410
When SLikeSoft was founded in 2016, we didn't foresee the workload and overhead which comes with a company. On top of this, things changed for both of the founders in their private life which led to the fact that we had to change the focus and activity on the company work.

Having yearly costs of around 1,000 Euros without producing that income and having to spend dozens of hours just for the administrative overhead of running the company, is certainly not a good basis. Also the expected donation based development turned out to not work out the way we hoped for.

The good thing however is that we will continue to run the company under a different legal form which reduces the overhead and costs to a bare minimum. On top of that we will simplify several things on the release and build processes as well as on the webpage, to reduce the overhead on that end too. This will allow us to invest a bigger portion of our time on the actual product development targeting the community version of SLikeNet.
During a transition period, the company will be run as a personal company by one of the founders ('Einzelunternehmen'). During this period, we won't provide any kind of paid services or donations.
After the transition is complete, the company will run as a 'Gesellschaft bürgerlichen Rechts (GbR)' by both of its founders.
For our paying customers nothing will change. We will still provide support and development as we did before.

There will also be no downsides for the community. Instead, you will see the following changes in the upcoming weeks:
- the webpage will change and we will only provide an English version of the page (removing the overhead of translating everything into German)
- we will focus on a new SLikeNet bugfix release (0.1.4) which will be the first version released under the new company form
- work on SLikeNet 0.2.0 is expected to be completed afterwards which will also ship with several new changes we so far developed for the companies which integrate SLikeNet in their products
- we establish fixed time slots to provide community support, which so far we were only able to provide to paying customers and hence will be more active on Discord as well as provide free of charge forum support too and
- we will replace the donation system with a supporter approach which will also come with some additional benefits for paying customers incl. ensured promises to react to support requests (even for free / unpaid requests)

We hope that this will bring a new light on SLikeSoft and SLikeNet and push the development effort.