Re: a2 dead? read this.

[jolomo@netcom.com (Joe Morris)]

On Tue, 09 Jun 1998 18:15:12 GMT Nathan Mates wrote:
> In article <357d7638.0@calico.litterbox.com>,
> Jim <jim@calico.litterbox.com> wrote:
> >I guess my point here is, there are still a few vendors selling old stuff and 
> >making new stuff for the apple2.  Let's stop whining about how we were dumped
> >by apple, and whatnot, and concentrate on preserving those vendors, eh?  

>    And that means acting like the C64 groups and not tolerating the
> pirates and thieves out to destroy the remaining vendors, programmers,
> etc. They focus solely on the past, and sacrifice any future. Get rid
> of them, or fewer and fewer programmers will *want* to work with such
> a platform. Those pirates are a cancer out to kill the system, so they
> must be removed-- sure it's not a pleasant experience taking them on,
> but they're out to kill the system and you've got to fight for its life.

>    You can have new software. Or you can have piracy. Don't ever count
> on having both at the same time. 

Here's my take on this whole area.  The previous poster was mainly
talking about hardware -- but let's talk about software.  I just
recently started following apple2 stuff again, for fun.  I'm thoroughly
in the Unix/Linux camp for my home box and work and I think that
model may be more suited to the apple2 camp than a purely "retail" or
money per copy model.  The only apple programming I ever did was
stupid hacks in basic (half-assed games, etc) and a couple of
short routines in machine language (usually following directly
from a magazine article) and now that I've got the system booted
back up again it's for fun -- it's cool to be able to run all
this old software again. Loderunner, Ultima I, II & III, dialing
in with Proterm transfering all my old AppleWorks files up
to my main box.  Notice this software is all 10+ years old.

It strikes me that anybody doing real programming for this
platform must be doing it because they know it well and
enjoy the environment -- not for great wealth.  More like
the mythical "home-brew" days where you want to create a
useful tool or neat hack and you want other people to be able
to use it.  I'd be interested to see a list of what's being
currently worked on and who's doing it.  If I can use it,
I'd buy a copy.

But I think an open source distribution would be best.  We are
a small community and every human resource is precious: there
are no 12 year old kids cranking out 6502 code, there will
be no "next" generation.  So why should we waste this precious
time trying to re-write something someone else might have done
a great job on.  A large collection of public source would
allow poor-programmers like myself to get involved and maybe
fix an annoying bug or add a feature or just experiment a little.

The second best would be a shareware type of thing.  This involves
trust, but with such a small community we should be able to trust;
it's not like there's gonna be a million free-loaders -- it would
be more like 1000 people happy to give something back to a
hardworking colleague.