TextBladeDenied

Another way to consider the issue is in the context of 'whistleblower' scenarios.

If an organization is doing something harmful, and you are party to that organization, or have non-disclosure agreements with that organization, you can legally and ethically disclose information about the organization if it would benefit the greater good.

There's always shades of gray of course, and obviously Mark Knighton's little operation doesn't rise to the level of Wikileaks vs NSA, but it's the same principle.

Ask yourself:

How/why is it essential/ethical/justified for 10,000+ customers to not know what the 'gift' is at this point, after everything that has happened thus far?

Give it some thought. 

Ethics is not black and white, juvenile opinions of certain people notwithstanding.

Context and circumstances change. When the gift was originally offered, it was in the context of imminent release.

In fact, it was always offered in the context of an imminent release, so in hindsight, it was always a deception.

The purpose of the 'top gift' is not to reward early adopters. The purpose of the 'top gift' is to be a secret which Mark Knighton controls, so early adopters have a harder time deciding whether or not to leave their money in his hands.

The 'top gift' is not a technology secret. It's not a trade secret. It will do no unjust harm to Waytools to make it known. If the gift is not so good, perhaps other customers will cancel their orders because it's not worth waiting for, but that would be perfectly fair to those customers who paid Mark Knighton a long time ago.

Why should customers be kept in the dark for so long? It's unethical to let this secret continue to be used by Mark Knighton as a tool of manipulation.

It's time for a Tregger with a conscience to reveal the secret 'top gift' so Mark can't use it against his customers anymore.

AnthRD said:

I was banned on the forums for “misrepresentation” when I tried to estimate when would finally be released (estimated 2016). They were right I was wrong, I was overly optimistic on when would be released. 

Wow. Mark Knighton clearly hates optimists. Thanks for sharing that perfect example of his nasty narcissistic authoritarian attitude towards his customers.

Hopefully some brave Treg tester will soon anonymously reveal the 'top gift'. I'm hoping there's at least one out there who can understand the rationale of chipping away at some of Mark's manipulative control of the situation. If the 'gift' is known, then customers can make a more informed decision about whether to continue waiting or not, after waiting for so long already, and as a bonus, perhaps Mark might be motivated to modify his behavior in a constructive way if he no longer wields the 'carrot and stick' and simply has to be judged based on what he can, or more likely, cannot accomplish. 

patientlywaiting said:

Is anyone else besides MK working on the code rewrite? Is this a solo project at this point?

Its fairly obvious that he’s the only one doing PR for WayTools. If he’s the only one working on the firmware, and he’s as timely and disciplined about coding as he is about updates...

I doubt Mark Knighton writes any code. He doesn't communicate in a style that indicates the mind of a developer. He almost certainly has to pay someone to write code.

He obviously isn't any good at PR either and should be paying someone to do that as well, but clearly there's no money available for either position.

One of the more likely reasons the firmware is being 'refactored' after almost 4 years of development is that he lost a developer, or perhaps even the entire team of developers. Can you imagine working at a company like this for so long and seeing all the negativity directed at the CEO for his stupid public behavior? Good developers are fickle people who need challenging work, and have many job opportunities, so it's extremely unlikely that Mark has a core team of developers that have persisted throughout this entire debacle.

It's also possible that a company he was transacting with to provide development environment support for the now 5+ year old Textblade chipset ceased to exist, or just moved on to another product and dumped Mark Knighton as a client. I have never heard of a company doing a ground up re-write of functional firmware unless they were forced to do it by circumstances out of their control.

Bottom line is, Mark Knighton collected a whole bunch of money 4+ years ago from thousands of customers, then squandered it, and will probably never be able to produce enough finished Textblades to fulfill all the orders. But he's an egotistical liar, so he's not going to tell anybody the truth about the Waytools financial troubles.

gmadden said:

I’ve got nothing inspirational to add to what’s already been stated on that front. 

That's too bad. Hopefully there's a more courageous Tregger out there somewhere who sees the situation for what it is and will provide some transparency, and thus some clarity, to the thousands of customers Mark Knighton has willfully scammed and deceived.