Post by Joe Forster/STAHi silverdr,
If you wrote some application and someone started criticizing it the way
you're criticizing ours, you'd understand how sad it makes us...
I sincerely apologize if I made you sad. I truly meant not to. And to be
completely frank - it is quite a paradox. I wrote what I wrote actually
not because I wanted to contemptuously criticise or humiliate your work.
What is so paradoxical, is the fact that it is quite the contrary: I
value both of your apps very high. So high as to make me dedicate low
capacity harddrive (so that DOS can still work on it), buy harddrive
racks, so that I can easily swap the drives, buy the DOS licence (just
in case as I have the machine in an office environment here and I had
limited success with FreeDOS) and spend quite a bit of time to make it
all work. The more paradoxical thing is that I even bothered to write
all that just because I cared to check the true potential and the amount
of work you needed to put into making the apps what they are today. And
I believe that it would be a great pity to let it pass away - yet my
intentions are perceived differently.
Post by Joe Forster/STABack in 1993-1994, when we started our projects, there wasn't even Windows
(in a useful and widely-spread form). There was only DOS. (I'm speaking
about home PC's, not the super-PC's of those times, or Amigas, Macintoshes
or mainframes.) I studied Modula-2 at the university, which is a fucked up
branch of Pascal; Peter, as he said, didn't study programming. :-) It was
pretty obvious to start coding a DOS software; I did in Pascal, Peter did
it in C. There was nothing wrong about it.
I agree.
Post by Joe Forster/STAYou _are_ definitely right that, today, DOS software is becoming obsolete.
However, I never wanted to "waste" my time with porting the Commander into
a multi-platform tool; Peter is at a great advantage at this point, as C
inherently is more portable than Pascal. Also, perhaps, someone - more
comfortable with non-DOS environments - could've/should've volunteered to
start porting the code while we continue adding functionality (!)...
But this is exactly what I am suggesting! Open it up. AFAIK you don't
claim any patents or trade secrets on SC. I guess the same applies to
Peter.
Post by Joe Forster/STAAs a result, we have two DOS applications that run fine in a Windows DOS
shell or in Linux dosemu. I'd like to stress that obsoleteness does not
mean uselessness!
And I perfectly agree! I wouldn't waste a single bit of my time to
discuss all this if they were useless. It just makes me somewhat sad
that they don't get more and more (even if relatively) use but rather
less and less. How long will it be until Microsoft drops the DOS vdms
from their future Windows? Speculations? Yes, but isn't that just possible?
Post by Joe Forster/STAAlso, it really makes me sad that people prefer the
completely unintuitive _and_ hard-to-use graphical Windows Explorer rather
than the well-designed, intuitive user interface of _any_ Commander-clone.
Well, here I am not exactly in line with you. While I also very much
agree that Windows Explorer is far from being highly efficient (the same
applies to many well-known filemanagers: Apple's Finder, KDE's
Konqueror, GNOME's Nautilus ...) I still don't find commander-style to
be the only and best choice. Anyway that's a completely different story.
Post by Joe Forster/STA(And, yes, I'm using a text-based Commander-clone, called FAR Manager, in
Windows... My family members and colleagues haven't even opened the
necessary Windows windows to execute a task when I'm already done with FAR
Manager... They're/You're wasting their/your time, I'm not.)
I know many people who use commander-style filemanagers in Windows. The
most often I see "Total Commander" (I believe that's the name) and
there's nothing wrong with it. Their choice.
Post by Joe Forster/STAAnd, perhaps hurting your feelings similarly as you hurt ours, let me ask
you: if you think a software from 1993-1994 is obsolete _now_, why do you
bother at all with _any_ software for a platform that became obsolete
already around 1993-1994?!
Once more I apologize if I unintentionally hurt yours and Peter's feelings.
As for your question: In the late eighties and early nineties I wrote
several apps. Some of them were found to be even good enough to bring me
a good money and make me proud that it was me who did it. Today I guess
almost nobody uses my Finaltape, MultiDrawer, LogoPainter etc... but if
today somebody said to me "develop it further or open it up becasue
otherwise your app won't survive long", I wouldn't feel hurt I guess. I
would rather be happy that someone still took time to check what it's
worth and found it interesting enough to care for its future. Where do
you believe would the Linux kernel be if Linus once said "I made it
first and it's mine, even if I don't make money on it. period."? And
more to answer you - I just don't know why I still "waste" my time to do
something for the 8bit CBMs from time to time, do you? Tell me if you
do, please ;-) But again: I didn't say your (and Peter's) software
is/was obsolete but only that it requires an obsolete environment to be
run, which limits its applicability and will limit it even more in the
future, effectively making the software obsolete _as a result_ ... If
you wish to give your babies a new life - set them free. I don't say
that someone will immediately start developing it further but at least
there is a chance. If you don't do it - you don't give it this chance.
While there is not much value left in my apps for the 8bit machines,
there is still very much left in yours. This can still be preserved and
extended if you either port it yourself or give a chance for others to
do it.
I can only hope that my intentions are clear with what I wrote above. In
any case, if there are two ways of understanding it and one of them is
making you believe I am being contemptuous or humiliating - I certainly
mean the other one ;-)
Regards.
silverdr