TLDR: Lots of Pain, Small if Any Gain.
We've been working on an agreement for two things, one is the initial review of the code, but the other is a retainer agreement to try to reduce the cost of auditing the code in the future given that it has the potential to change. I think I mentioned before that we were willing to pay the initial cost up front, but anyone else would have to pay for it on a go-forward. Honestly, it's kind of a hassle though and it's also fairly expensive, but the main reason is just that we're not sure it's worth the effort to try to keep it closed. The people who were circumventing it before are going to circumvent it again. We've been doing everything we can to try to make sure it's on the up-and-up, which is why dannuic wrote almost all of that code from scratch. MQ is GPL and pulling code from it and putting it into another library carries with it the likelihood that you're violating GPL, which means that some of the protections HAVE to be left out of that library because they were previously in GPL'd code. It leaves us with splitting our code into what was GPL and what is new and since dannuic, brainiac, and I all believe in the open source license it's been an interesting headache to say the least. So when it came down to it, we were spending a LOT of time trying to satisfy this requirement and to what end? We've been worried about a cat and mouse game with DPG because it's a lot of work to do that, but we're also already in a cat and mouse game due to the recent situation. Then there's the ongoing trust issues that it brings with it since the code can't be audited in any short timeframe and we've already had one situation which is all the more reason to audit it frequently. While we've been trying to make that as inexpensive and painless as possible, the reality is that Redbot is likely the only one who would ever call in that token and I doubt he'd call it in anytime soon. So we're starting to run thin on benefits over time/cost/effort of having this closed component.
I don't have the face for PR, that's @Redbot, but I'm guessing the lines of communication are always open (albeit not often used). But I don't think they really care about what revisions the tool is in, just what it does and how it impacts them.
I'm all for providing helpers and doing what we can to make it easy to accomplish the goals that Redbot has. But we're not here to police the community so we're not going to try to put a limit or governor on the tool itself. That's what sites like RG are for -- community guidelines on appropriate use and what the community will and won't support/tolerate. But the tool itself is just a tool, it's how you use it that really matters. And I do believe most if not all of the work to accomplish the goals of being less impactful is in the hands of script writers.
