john13@garfield.UUCP (02/19/87)
[] I've noticed lately a lot of commercial products very similar in appearance to PD programs I've gotten from the net - or is it the other way around? Some examples are Matt Dillon's Shell <-> Metacompco Shell, some Zing utilities <-> PopCLI, saveilbm, browsers and lately Matt's Med <-> Professional Text Engine You people who are writing PD stuff (or commercial stuff, as the case may be), in your experience is it usually the case that someone looks at a commercial product and says "Hey, that isn't so hard to do", or someone sees a PD program and says "Hey, this is a good idea which people would pay money for." I know that I (in my programming infancy) can write programs to simulate most of the functions of DPaint I, so I would tend to think the former. However, if I was to ever try and market something that I had produced, I think that I would probably find that many of my techniques (and in some cases whole sections of code) had been extracted from public domain offerings. Note 1: I am not saying anyone is ripping off anyone else's ideas; I'm just curious about the whole thing. Note 2: If you have Zing! or know somebody who does, invoke the browser from the CLI with no arguments (it's called ztypea) and read the error message. John
dillon@CORY.BERKELEY.EDU.UUCP (02/20/87)
>I've noticed lately a lot of commercial products very similar in appearance >to PD programs I've gotten from the net - or is it the other way around? > >Some examples are Matt Dillon's Shell <-> Metacompco Shell, > some Zing utilities <-> PopCLI, saveilbm, browsers >and lately Matt's Med <-> Professional Text Engine Well, I have never seen or used the Metacompco Shell or the Professional Text Engine. My Shell is based on UN*X CSH. The Metacompco Shell probably is based somewhat on CSH also, which would explain the similar appearance. Med's interface is based on Texit (A Text editor I wrote for the PET computer 4 years ago), but is so straight forward that one can draw similarities with most other editor's on the market. (The purpose of MED was to provide a *fast* low-memory-usage editor). P.S. Don't confuse my Med with another Med which is floating around the net. Originally I was going to call it DED for 'Dillon Ed', but that sounds to much like 'DEAD'. -Matt