Celestia Forums

The CelestiaMatters site is dead. There is no news about celestia.Sci.

Some old users disappeared.

What's going on?

What is dead cannot die.

I hope they are not dead!

I just don't see the old familiar users from the other forum and that is strange.

I hoped they would share some info about celestia.Sci but apparently they are not following this forum...

That's very unfortunate.

I mean, their entire project was originally stillborn. For so many years, except for promising screenshots, they have not published anything.
Therefore, if everyone left the CelestiaMatters, the loss is not great.

I think we should convince them to share their code. On the other hand where is Selden or John Van Vliet?

They are both here, just not super active.

Celestia.sci was never going to be finished anyway.
It's not like the loss of CelestialMatters is a significant one.

It seemed promising. I don't understand why they would invest so much effort and work for nothing...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_lp60YvOTA

Because they stuck to the license "Mypreciousware".

The constant trash talk towards celestia.Sci and the people involved does not reflect well on this community.

ajtribick wrote:The constant trash talk towards celestia.Sci and the people involved does not reflect well on this community.

Normal developers publish their results for people. In order to in the future people can use, test and thereby help in development. Creators of Celestia.Sci "closed from the world", which is simply unacceptable in the free software world.

So the criticism in this case is completely fair.

ajtribick wrote:The constant trash talk towards celestia.Sci and the people involved does not reflect well on this community.

I agree that we should respect the private decisions and work of other human beings, but celestia.Sci developers made a PUBLIC announcement and a PUBLIC promise (a forum and a website) 5-6 years ago. They made us believe that this is 1.) a viable project and 2.) it is close to completion. That was obviously a false pretense. And now - after years of waiting - they disappeared. I do not think that is cool in any way.

As celestia.Sci is unpublished, there is no obligation to share the code. I refer you to the GNU Licenses FAQ.

The GPL does not require you to release your modified version, or any part of it. You are free to make modifications and use them privately, without ever releasing them. This applies to organizations (including companies), too; an organization can make a modified version and use it internally without ever releasing it outside the organization.

This is being done in people's free time. And in the real world, projects don't get completed, or take longer than expected all the time. It's a normal part of software development.

Check your sense of entitlement.

OK, but please do not belittle a community which actually keeps this software alive. If you have a working code and you want to use it behind close doors, it is OK. It is OK, legally. It is very not OK morally. So I don't think celestia.Sci has the moral high ground here. This forum and development team actually serves humanity, makes people happy and makes this software alive.

If I decide to make changes to Celestia's source code, I am not morally obligated to send you every individual keystroke I make. The celestia.Sci developers consider their changes to be in a work-in-progress state, it is their decision on what stage they decide to release them, and in what forum.

Not releasing work-in-progress software is not a crime.

Check your sense of entitlement.

Reliance damages is the measure of compensation given to a person who suffered an economic harm for acting in reliance on a party who failed to fulfill their obligation. I repeat, not releasing a work-in-progress is harmless and moral. Publicly announcing a bogus project is immoral, at least in my opinion. If the celestia.Sci team never intended to release the publicly announced software and let hundreds of hours of forum participation to be wasted, that's not moral in my opinion.

Expecting someone to act morally is not an entitlement. It is called normalcy.

A project taking longer than expected does not make it bogus or fraudulent.
A project that turns out not to work in the end does not make it bogus or fraudulent.
The people involved have lives outside celestia.Sci, progress can be slow or grind to a halt for long periods of time.

Talking of economic harm caused by a non-released piece of free software that no-one's being paid for is quite frankly ludicrous, as are your arguments that there is something immoral going on. The celestia.Sci developers do not owe you their time and are free to make their own decision about when they feel they are ready to release their code.

Thank you for the info and for coming down from the ivory tower. A few honest words about the project actually make us "entitlement freaks" a little more content. It feels for a minute or two that we are not subhumans after all.

I will agree that Celestia.sci was deserving of attention and respect, as they implemented great things, like gravitational lensing and elliptical galaxy rendering.

However, the developers' bad attitude and rude responses to questions, along with continued unfounded promises of a beta release in the near future, causes the majority of the community to become skeptical of the project.

I will agree that Celestia.sci was deserving of attention and respect, as they implemented great things, like gravitational lensing and elliptical galaxy rendering.

However, the developers' bad attitude and rude responses to questions, along with continued unfounded promises of a beta release in the near future, causes the majority of the community to become skeptical of the project.

I agree with fyr on this.