Nathan's farewell...

[ljsilicon@aol.com (LJSILICON)]

I guess the word going around is true. Nathan has given up on the Apple II
community. Here is his farewell rant.

********

It is with great regret that I must announce that I feel that the Apple II
community has been turned into a wasteland by pirates, thieves and liars.
Further, a community that refuses to stand up to these scum is participating in
their nonsense-- especially when they get suckered into believing that
politeness is more important than the truth.
The Apple II community doesn't give a shit about the constant piracy, thievery,
and hate of developers. And what's worse is that more people throw a fit that I
just used a 4 letter word instead of being angry at the pirates that are truly
killing the Apple II's future.

I have invested many thousands of hours in Apple II creations, from programming
to maintaining the best and most correct set of Apple II resources. Thanks to
the jerks, this work has been constantly maligned, stolen, insulted and I now
count that investment of time as a waste. The Apple II community has been given
up on years ago by people with more common sense-- and now it is my turn to
join them by turning my back on the "community," shaking the dust off my feet
at them and moving on.

The pirates may be able to steal various works. But, the creator has the true
power that they never can match-- the power to also destroy. To this end, I
have low-leveled all HD partitions and backups on my machines. There will not
be another GUPP update from me, no Twilight II 2.0. Many other projects in
various stages of development-- previously unannounced due to my not wanting to
promote vaporware-- will likewise never appear on the Apple II. All files used
to create this web site have been similarly overwritten; I have *none* of those
files in my posession anymore-- and they won't be coming back. And from my
opinion, that's a good thing, as I won't have to put up with the constant
barrage of lies and unappreciative users.

As long as the Apple II community is too idiotic to tell the difference between
the truth and lies couched in politeness, to tell the difference between
supporting pirates and developers, to tell the difference between meaningless
talk and actually creating, it will be cursed to have more and more top
developers leave. Less and less will be created until the platform lies in
obscurity, only the domain of a few backbiting thieves who'll never create
anything new again.

Special mentions of thieves, liars, and crooks who have tried their best to
push away developers: Charles Turley (piracy and lies), Jeff Hurlburt (aka
Rubywand and SiFan-- more lies and outright hate of developers, as the Wolf3D
incident proved), Karl Asha (running a pirate site), Patrick Kane (same), Steve
Mentzer (posting many pirated materials, then claiming for years to not have
done so). The blame for lack of Apple II development lies firmly at their feet,
but nobody seems to have cared.

And from me to the Apple II community: goodbye and good riddance. You asked for
developers to shun you, and they're too happy to oblige. Don't bother
contacting me; filters have been put in place to automatically toast such
messages.

Nathan Mates

7/14/98

*********

This brings to mind a favorite saying... "Don't let the door hit you in the ass
on the way out!"