>However, he's decided
>he wants to limit his sales in order that he won't have to do as much
>support according to his email to me last night. I replied, but it
>bounced for some reason. He can do that. He's got the right. I have the
>right to say it's a shame.
OK, Joshua. I was interested in your point of view as anyone until
now. Let me quote that part of my message:
>About the price issue, your arguments are not uninteresting. In my point
>of view, there are 3 views to consider on this issue.
>
>- the usefulness.
>...
>- the amount of development work.
>...
>- the business target or "who's interested and how would I handle the
>customer support". I know how important is customer support and how much
>work it requires. I already receive many mails while the software isn't
>sold yet. I'm frightened about people writing to me and saying that they
>lost their data, etc.
I don't think that you're summarizing my point of view perfectly, to
make an understatement.
I just mean here that customer support will be a huge amount of work
and there will be fees. I don't think I mentionned that I have bought
an eMate to fix the bug that is related to it. From the business
point of view, either I charge for the support or the software price
includes the support. Since I'm already supporting many software,
I'll choose the second option.
Of course, I could possibly say to Paul Filmer who has problems with
NPDS go to hell. But I'm not like this, I mean I feel too responsible
to do so. I've updated some package to try to help him fix his issue.
I can't work on it 24/7 but I have planned to try to help him further
by looking in the code where something could go wrong. And NPDS is
free AND open source. This is just an example. And I constantly think
that I haven't brought enough support to my own pieces of code (think
Waba serial/socket code, alt.rec.... famous bug, etc.). If some
Newton user paid something for a software of mine, he would expect
even more support. So from a business point of view, this is work
that has to be retributed. There are of course the other two points
of view I mentionned in this mail.
Now, about the bounce, I think I can mention something. I'm sorry it
bounced, I've just realized that pine I was using under OS X wasn't
properly configured. It sent messages with paul_at_kallisys.net address
which indeed bounces.
The thing is that I wasn't running OS X because I got bored by all
the video games I have. I actually installed doxygen on it to
generate the documentation of ATA Support and then, I had lunch with
Nicolas Zinovieff, a fellow Newton developer. He came home so I could
look at his screen problem. I unfortunately damaged the screen
further (I still have problems to sleep :( ).
To make a long story short, Nicolas is an OS X apostle and was
working with some colleagues at Apple on the AppleTalk problem. You
Joshua might not care because you're apparently a Wintel person, but
it was believed that MacOS X didn't handle the subprotocol of
AppleTalk that the Newton uses. I say it was believed because I got
it working yesterday before I sent this mail to you by tweaking
Nicolas' work. And he got it working today on the latest stable of
Jaguar he got at work, from what I understood of his mail.
And I think that Nicolas is going to work on IrDA now. This is great news.
I haven't decided what to do with this connection library. I first
planned to release it open source. I don't plan to make money out of
it, but I killed Nicolas's screen and he refuses that I replace it.
If anyone around has ideas, I'll take it ;)
Paul
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Thu Aug 01 2002 - 06:03:21 EDT