On Friday, January 25, 2002, at 11:19 AM, Stephanie Maks wrote:
> I know this is a mostly emotional rhetorical question, but isn't it good
> enough that people are still working on free-ware for the Newton?
Not for me.
I'm a software developer. If I need a tool, I have three options:
1. Make it from scratch.
2. Obtain a binary from someone else.
3. Modify someone else's source.
#1 is usually too difficult. #2 usually results in a tool that's not
really what I need. But asking the developer to tweak the tool for my
purposes is usually like pulling teeth -- freeware authors have no such
incentive ("it's free", they say, "you get what you pay for"). In the
Newton community there are few exceptions to this rule -- and most of
them boil down to Steve Weyer. :-)
Without source code I'm stuck. Either I have to reinvent the wheel from
scratch or I have to live with the half-assed version Person X
published. And for a developer, that's an amazingly frustrating
position to be in.
Consider the following tools I've written and their stories:
- Overlord. EVERY existing calendar program on the Newton had managed
to avoid doing the one thing that nearly everyone I've talked to
actually *needs*: a high-level view of what's going on this week
and the next. So I wrote the dang thing from scratch.
Actually, this one is interesting because Stephanie
herself Overlord wanting -- and used my open source to produce a
a version more to HER liking.
- BigCountdown. This one I wrote because I had an upcoming
presentation for the Smithsonian, and I needed an egg timer app
that you could ACTUALLY SEE from a distance. None of the existing
ones that were close had open source. So I wrote it from scratch.
- Radicals. I needed a Chinese input system, and all the existing
ones were closed source and the wrong procedure. So I had to, once
again, write the whole thing from scratch. Also, my Cantonese Yale
Romanization Input Module, which I'm probably the only person in
the world to have ever used :-), was only made possible because
Joseph Chen (who has a closed source Chinese input system) was kind
enough to create based on data I provided him. Otherwise I'd have
once again rewritten the entire thing from scratch.
- My PostScript and Chinese fonts are only due to open source fonts
provided from other sources which I was able to massage and modify
into (IMHO) much more useful things. Otherwise I don't know what
I'd have done there.
- I asked Servant Software (makers of the freeware KJV Bible) if
they'd open their source so I could use the software to make highly
compressed versions of the Book of Mormon etc. The response was:
they'd rather not because it's icky code. [There's another
possibility that I don't want to get into]. I know how their code
works: Fedor basically enumerated all of the words in the Bible and
stored it that way. But it'd be too much work for me to do and so
we're all stuck with very large Paperback texts compared to his
Bible when we could have really made some tight stuff.
- I recently asked Scrawlsoft if they'd consider opening the PT100
source so I could peek inside and maybe add SSHv1 to it. Note that
I'm a paying customer of PT100, and I imagine at this point it
doesn't comprise much of a revenue stream for them (it's been in
"beta" for what, four years now?). The answer I got was: give
us the SSH code first, and then we'll think about it. Net result:
don't expect to see SSH on the Newton any time soon.
Look, if you need just ONE good reason to open your source, here it is:
you increase the probability that Paul Guyot will contribute to
it. :-) So I call again for those Newton Freeware and Shareware
Authors still out there: OPEN YOUR SOURCE!
Sean
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