CCP's War On Bots: DirectEVE Goes Open Source

With attention fixed on ISBoxer and the effect that CCP Falcon's post on input broadcasting would have on how the multiboxing application works in 2015, the developer of another Inner Space extension quietly made news of his own last Friday.  Da Teach, the creator of DirectEVE, the Inner Space extension that powers the Questor ratting and mission bot, made the following post on the Questor forums on 21 November:

"We had a great run, for several years DirectEve has been a huge player in the EVE Online automation community. But every great beginning has an end. We no longer have any developers actively supporting the project, so its time to open the source.

"The source can be found here: [redacted]

"Please note that the license still applies, which can be found here: [redacted]

"@CCP:
I seriously do not get why you were never able to stop this bot. It's not exactly hard For your next MMO, consider consulting bot builders about anti hacking mechanisms."

Also on Friday, Questor developer ferox2552, who developed a fork of the Questor bot that did not require Inner Space to run, published one word in his development thread: "Discontinued."  In mid-October, ferox2552 had posted that he lost his latest copy of the source code which contained critical fixes and then went silent until his "Discontinued" post.

From the posts I've read, the available ferox line does not work at all and the Questor versions that do work use Inner Space and are a bit wonky and require human attention.  In short, except for a few programmers who understand the code, Questor is dying.  Unless someone is able to come in and maintain the DirectEVE code, Questor will die a slow, lingering death.

For years, Questor was one of the best, if not the best, botting programs running in EVE.  Seeing it finally fade away is a bit of good news in CCP's War on Bots.  But the software has looked like it was dying in the past.  Hopefully this time, Questor will not rise from its deathbed.