GREYELF@WPI.BITNET (05/01/89)
Okay, here's the beef: A new software company by the name of World of Shareware is being formed. We already have five authors, and we are looking to produce a demo disk of software for the fall when we get back to school. WOS is totally non-profit, and copyrights for submitted software will be registered in the name of the author, not the company. The details: I'll license a company and establish a P.O. Box in Ct. for people to send requests for shareware/freeware. We could make demo disks available for shareware programs, and publish/transmit one disk of freeware every so often. This merely provides a single place at which to reach many authors with questions, requests for changes, bug fixes etc. Shareware fees that are sent would be paid directly, and in full to the author of the software, making WOS a completely non-profit organization, eligible for grants from Apple Corp., Video Technologies, etc. Copyrights for individual programs would be registered to the author of the program, NOT to WOS. The copyrights could be placed on an entire disk at once, making it possible to pay the copyright fee once for every 800K of material generated. The single box, single address nature of WOS would make it possible for people without net access to contact the company/authors and receive information or materials. The other purpose of WOS would be to provide coordination among authors. No quotas would be established, and noone would be told what to write, or not to write. Rather an author could note problems being experienced to other authors, and people could feel free to share source or code back and forth and not have to worry about losing their copyright status. We subscribe to the honor system. This also makes it possible to organize LARGE projects, such as the proposed development of IInix. We would then suddenly find it possible to contact other authors, or work in groups to develop a group project. At this time roughly twelve people have expressed an interest in joining, or submitting material for archiving/release. I state again, the copyrights will be registered for any material submitted, and in the names of the authors who created it. WOS is merely an alliance of authors, it holds no legal claim to intellectual or other properties generated by its members. Please reply to me and indicate whether or not you are interested in joining the alliance. Use email, as come the end of the year in four days I'll be signing off of the nets. Side note: When I was younger and wrote a piece of software I had hoped for a company that wouuld publish a piece of my software at no cost to me. The only costs to be maintained would be for disks, postage, and proposed GEnie accounts. Michael. -- Michael J Pender Jr Box 1942 c/o W.P.I. I wrote SHELL and Daemon, greyelf@wpi.bitnet 100 Institute Rd. send bug reports, suggestions, greyelf@wpi.wpi.edu Worcester, Ma 01609 checks to me. At home: 80 Canal Road, Granby Ct. 01609, (203) 668-0147 **** World of Shareware is a proposed title at this time and bears no relation to any other software group which may bear the same name at this time.
orcus@pro-lep.cts.com (Brian Greenstone) (05/07/89)
Network Comment: to #3146 by pnet01!crash!mitvma.mit.edu!GREYELF%WPI.BITNET Hey, I think that's a _great_ idea if it will work. As I posted a few days ago, I am going to write a bunch of freeware mini-games this summer, and I think WOS would be a great way to do it. Keep us informed. -Brian
greyelf@wpi.wpi.edu (Michael J Pender) (02/07/90)
I've played with the idea of actually going to the trouble of licensing WOS, and forming a non-profit organization, but I think there's a better way to meet the same goals. For those of you who don't know what WOS was, it was a proposed organization to allow authors of freeware/shareware materials to converse, and to support large projects. Well I think the business idea was bad. I'll be out of school in under a year, and I'd hate to see a project that showed such support die when I leave. Here's what I have in mind. Anyone who wants to can join. I'll provide an occasional mailing list saying who's working on what, so that people working on similar projects can converse. But this is an idea i just came up with. I'll also make a list of things people WANT to see. I have a few ideas of things I'd like to see myself. Anyways, the listing would be sent out to people like a mailing list, say once a week. Half the difficulty of writing a useful program is deciding what would be useful. (spoken from experience). Also, it would keep us from re-inventing the wheel. - I would love to see a short and sweet text/apw file editor. Often I load up proterm just to use its editor to manipulate a file, to remove headers (not everything is binscii) or strip off mailer information. - I would love a program that could download in the background. Like an addon to Daemon or something. If I ever work out the damn bugs in my window routines (my project for this weekend) we might just see it. - I'd like to see a print spooler that can run in the background. My approach to these last two tasks would be to use a chunk of the 64K ramdisk under prodos to do the dump. A printer routine can't very well be doing disk accesses, your drive would spin constantly. I'm assuming basically everyone has 128K nowadays.