How did the community lived back then, why there were no modding and editors?
I don't know exactly why there were no modding tools made for the game back in the day, but it might have been because the community was quite scattered which made coordinated efforts difficult and probably also made it less interesting for people to pursue modding of the game.
While not directly asked, I though I'd mention that the most active English community was probably over at GameTalk in post 2001. Well it wasn't as much of a community as it was random people coming by and dropping in for some quick questions.
Sadly the website is long gone by now.
Who were the OpenKaM founders?
Regarding OpenKam, which version exactly are you talking about? I know there were a bunch of different OpenKam projects, but I don't think any of them really got off the ground to be honest.
Did anyone talked with The Barbarian about the game editing?
I have some old email conversations with The Barbarian on an old email account in regards to editing. It's mostly about the general morality of publishing modding information since as we know he wasn't very keen on sharing his findings. IIRC he contacted me after I published some modding information; need I say he wasn't in the best of mood.
Who started the ServiceRelease patches?
The service releases patches originally when The Knight discovered that you could fix the faulty TSK campaign included in TPR by copying over the mission files from TSK. IIRC he released this as some form of first Service Release.
Later on he was contacted by The Barbarian and then they got more fixes done once The Barbarian started decoding the files so that they could actually fix the broken files.
Which community site/forum appeared first?
The Knight's website is probably one of the first websites, it goes way back. I can't say for sure whether it was the first one but it has always been a very influential website. It was hosted under some other website back in the day though, can't remember the URL it had back then though.
I remember The Knight mentioning that there was some big unofficial German Knights and Merchants forum that was closed down sometime in the early 00's that was used ways more than the official forum. Never found that forum myself though.
Did KaM developers took part in community live?
They did take some part in the community, on the old TopWare forum they used to make a few posts every now and then addressing people regarding upcoming patches and the mission CD etc. These posts might still be in the German TopWare Knights and Merchants forum (they were a few years ago at least).
EDIT: Just dug up the forums and seems the original posts are still there, you can see an example of a thread in which Peter posted
here.
I have heard that TheKnight pursued TheBarbarian to keep his findings closed-source and don't release incomplete/beta versions of his tools and that in the end they have parted because of that.
I don't think that is correct. From what I can recall, they pretty much mutually agreed that the game would be better off if the file formats were never made public and that the tools they would release would use their own formats and then when you're ready export into the game format. He was definitely opposed to sharing the decoding formats of the game, not once did he mention he was opposed to this simply because The Knight thought it would be best for the game.
January 2005, and it looked like this:
Right, that layout was very short-lived. I think the new layout was put out in February. The first layout was up for about a month or so.