EVERHART@arisia.dnet.ge.com (05/30/90)
There are some of us who believe in writing and giving out software to teach commercial vendors a lesson; I hope to tell you there's an intent in some of those cases to impact commercial vendors. Consider AnalytiCalc. When I first wanted a spreadsheet on our PDP11/70, commercial ones cost $4000, at the same time one could buy a cp/m version for $200-$300. This appeared to me a ripoff, and I decided the way to feel good about it was to write my own, try to make it better than the commercial ones, and give it away. At initial writing I named it VisiKludge, but changed the name a few times because it was intended to be seriously useful. I've known quite a few PD and shareware items which have been maintained better than commercial ones; it's easier to do due to the informality of the distribution; also, if you release sources you SOMETIMES get pleasantly surprised by people contributing extra features and fixes. It happened to me. Shareware is however not a very good way to make money, and tends to make sources less available. In some ways it's guaranteed death for a program to go out this way. That is, it will probably work well on today's OS release, but eventually will not, and if the sources are unavailable, nobody else can pick the code up. The good PD stuff however gets passed around and gets better and better, like a stew. My belief is that the shareware phenomenon was started by a few lucky and skillful initial releases on PC that actually made money, and by income tax laws, which used to allow one to deduct $5K off the price of one's PC if bought for business use. Well, write something and release it asking for money and voila! A business use so we go down the ol' section 179 and let Uncle Sugar pay for part of the PC. We are very fortunate in the Amiga world that many now realize that one can't expect to make much out of shareware, and that we all benefit greatly by releasing sources. It's unfortunate that advertising and other sales costs are so high (the innovation Lotus brought in which most disgusts me was the ultrahigh priced ad campaign). If you write something good, though, even if you cannot have much cash for it without a large bankroll, you can have some fame and share with your colleagues. Personally I'd rather see my stuff out there and being used than charge a bundle for it and know that very few people could use it. Oh yes, I'm still amused to try to adversely affect some commercial people. I recently added a whole raft of 3D features, for example, to make life more interesting for Lotus, which is moving into the VMS arena. The Amiga flavor of AnalytiCalc got the enhancements as a side effect. Rather than regarding this as a form of dumping (an analogy that works very poorly IMHO), I regard it as a case of some programming for money, others for love. A work done for the love of doing it is NOT necessarily inferior to the one done for money in any way whatsoever. The amount of time one puts into it may depend on money, but one's skill and inventiveness do not necessarily. Glenn Everhart Everhart@Arisia.dnet.ge.com