[comp.sys.amiga] Chickens vs Eggs

john13@garfield.UUCP (02/19/87)

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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