À (At) 10:02 -0500 11/12/02, Jeffrey M. Swiger écrivait (wrote) :
>If this sync Strategy was a Package deal, The Cash would FLOW in!...
>This would be a small GOLD-Mine!
I don't think a complete synchronization tool is viable as a business
plan. (I don't think an ATA driver is either).
It's a huge amount of work. I mean the plan Joseph gave. It's not
like importing and exporting the names database with a single
software. It's doing it with many software, doing it preserving a lot
of things (I don't know how much time John puts on NewtSync, but
transferring notes with sketches won't be very easy from what I saw
of the design he chose). Backups and package installation are also
very different from the design of NewtSync. On the other hand, his
approach "à la" Sloup allowed him to quickly offer synchronization
features (Windows folks, do you know about Victor's tool that uses
Sloup?).
I've thought a lot about the proper plan for a connection tool since
I realized that my next computer wouldn't run NCU/NTK/NPI/NBU/NP
natively (the new computer is here for three weeks, so I'm a little
bit late). My approach was to replace Apple's DILs and NCU so I used
a native (but slower) approach that talks Newton's native language
(you have Newton data on the desktop and you can manipulate it as on
the Newton). And I know it's so much work that I wouldn't bring it
entirely myself to all the platforms there is a demand for
(especially Windows, I'm not a Windows programmer at all), although I
did my best to make it portable.
So I wondered how to market that. I also had another problem. I
wanted Laurent to work on it (since he's capable and was interested)
and it seemed to me that Laurent could justify the work to his wife
only if it would bring some money home. Indeed I could easily be
forgiven by my wife if I had any of the effort I spent on ATA Support
by taking her to a nice romantic short vacation paid with the
shareware fees (fortunately I'm still a student, I actually sleep
during classes and I don't have to sacrifice time spent with my
friends to actually code for the Newton platform).
Finally, the only way to market it in my opinion is open source. I
know we had some discussion here about open sourcing ATA Support and
other things like this. I'm not completely convinced of that choice,
but I haven't found anything better.
My own experience (with Filtre & Go for EIMS) is that real open
source doesn't really make money. Nevertheless, I'm able to improve
some projects several years after they were released because they
were open sourced. And if Apple had open sourced the DILs, I wouldn't
have spent so much time rewriting it (today, the DCL framework does
less than NCU but more than the DILs).
For the moment, I coded something like 90% of it, Nicolas did the
decisive 5% for the MacOS X port and is now finishing some parts of
the protocol and Michael Vacìk is bringing us a very nifty GUI
(you'll love it). Both of them do that for the fun like me. Victor
offerred to port it to Linux (actually, the only work is to write a
GNU make Makefile ;), I don't think he'll refuse to do it because
there is no monetary retribution.
Paul
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