Sailors of the Coast, January 15.
There have been a lot of rumours going about recently which suggest that we are an evil, money-hungry corporation that wants to destroy everything sacred about the Open Boating License we released in 2000. This could not be further from the truth. Believe us when we say that we love the international boating community and would never do anything to harm it. You are what makes Buoys and Boats great. We wouldn’t be where we are today without you.
Did we try to send out abusive contracts to independent creators, give them a short deadline to sign and hope that our NDAs would stop them from leaking to the boating community? Yes. Did we include clauses that give us the right to steal your work, then ban you from ever creating content using the OBL again? Absolutely. Did we include a ridiculous royalty structure that would see many businesses fail to turn over a profit? Indeed we did. But you have to understand that we did these things because we believed they were the right thing to do. We genuinely thought that putting your local welder for bow rail installation out of business was best for everyone.
You have made it apparent that this was not actually best for everyone. We hear you loud and clear; we are listening. You are going to hear arrogant content creators online claim that they won, because we are going to make changes to this draft OBL. But they didn’t win. We won. We listened to our community, which is a win for us. Now you can see that we are one of the good mega corporations and that we would never try to take advantage of you. Your favourite marine stainless steel fabrication business near Melbourne gets to stay in business, so we are the good guys.
We love the boating community and the passionate creators who use the Buoys and Boats manual to make their own creations, and we would never want to do harm to any of you.
You can trust us because we promise to never take advantage of your stupidity again.