[NTLK] END: Hacked WiFi driver

Hi Folks,

As a relatively senior member of this group, there are a few things that need to be pointed out.

Since the very beginning of this group, back when Sean O'Shanessey was the "List Mom", there has been a no tolerance policy for pirated software, requests for serial numbers, and other discussions of this ilk.

As others have pointed out, we are a community of users and developers. As users of the fantastic array of software available for our platform of choice, we are highly dependent on our developers to keep the Newton relatively up-to-date with the current technology.

Development for the Newton has always been an exercise in semi-altruism. There is little to no possible profit motive for any developer of software for this platform. We do not have the user base to allow any developer to recover the cost of development...this is economic fact.

Many of our developers were attracted to the device as users due to our sense of community, saw the interesting development environment, decided to experiment, and eventually delivered incredible software to our community. Much of this software has been delivered to us as freeware, since there is no possible profit motive.

Some projects have a registration cost, but only those that required an astronomical effort to bring to market, such as Hiroshi's WIFI driver or Paul's ATA driver. Neither of these folks will ever recover their development costs...it just mitigates the tremendous time and effort costs expended in trying to bring us a useful product.

We have, among our community, several developers that still participate in the community. How do you think they feel about discussions of software theft? How incented would *you* be to sink time and effort in a product that eventually will be stolen by the very users you were trying to help?

Even the discussion violates the very tenants of this community...of honesty, accountability, fairness, and helpfulness...the very things that attracted most of you to this group in the first place.

So...please...let this thread die here. It is all of our best interests.

And, if you need WEP for your WIFI connection, let's start researching ways of getting this done legally. This community really rocks when a problem is presented to solve. I'm sure our developers will help guide us to a solution.

Apologies for the rant!

Thanks and regards,

Gary

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