Delphi users vs. Dr. Tom

[toddpw@ugcs.caltech.edu (Todd P. Whitesel)]

Rubywand <rubywand@swbell.net> writes:

>     Possibly you know that Dr. Tom is among the most creative and
>productive originators of Apple II projects. His recently concluded,
>successful effort to move A2 stuff from AOL to ground is just one
>example. (It took a _lot_ of his time as did the efforts to reclassify
>popular copyrighted A2 wares for public domain availability to all II
>users.)  Yet, when Dr. Tom tried to engage in discussions in a Delphi
>chatroom, those present all left. Such behavior is unkind, stupid, and
>childish.

Granted, Dr. Tom initiated some worthwhile projects. But he also had a long
history of getting "too" enthusiastic, infringing on someone else, reacting
viciously when contradicted, threatening legal action on frivolous grounds,
backing down and groveling when confronted with the evidence against his
claims, nursing his wounds, and then doing the whole thing all over again
with some other piece of intellectual property and its owner. He had many
chances to "go straight" and blew so many of them that the original thriving
Apple II community which justified all the comp.sys.apple2.* subgroups gave
up on usenet and went to online services where there are paid topic police.

The big problem with the Apple II market for years has been that we have a
bunch of users trying to "save the community" by acting as if all copyrights
are dead the minute a company stops actively offering their Apple II product,
but we also have a bunch of users (and a nearly deterioriated clump of
companies) tyring to "save the market" by acting as if all copyrights are
still live until explicitly released into the public domain by their
respective owners (which is how the law sees it, when invoked).

One group shouts "piracy", the other shoots back with "fascist!".

Both are right.

Whether you like it or not, such fascism was the only thing keeping the last
remaining Apple II companies expecting to make any money off new Apple II
products. The attitude of piracy suddenly being okay much of the time did
not sit well with businesspeople already looking at declining profits and
lots of pressure to move on and dedicate all their energy to the Mac or PC.

I personally felt that Dr. Tom contributed more than anyone else to dividing
the Apple II community. The secondary and far more devastating effect of
this division was to turn off many people expecting to find a C64-like user
community. We will never know how many there were.

The people on GEnie/Delphi are serious about their Apple II's such that
they are willing to pay money to use a forum which is actively maintained.
Usenet will never be this, so anyone who can't/won't pay for an online
service pretty much has to use usenet (or AOL freebies) as their forum for
discussion. The reason we saw so much of Dr. Tom here is because he got
himself booted from all the other services, or couldn't afford them in the
first place.

Most of the people on Delphi are convinced through personal experience that
Dr. Tom is a total psycho. They've long since given up trying to take him
seriously because it turned out to be a total waste of their time. Dr. Tom
would not give up, repeatedly ignored lessons he should have learned from
the numerous times he was beat back, and would not ever rely on independent
and impartial sources for his controversial claims. Over and over again he
would ask people to call him for the truth or to give him an address to mail
his proof to. But it always seemed to come from him directly. Why was nobody
else with a well-established reputation willing to support Dr. Tom? Why did
Dr. Tom occasionally make claims that could be disproved by Apple manuals??

Back about the time Dr. Tom threatened to sue me, I asked for simple evidence
that his OSRL or 1WSW were actually registered as a corporate entity of some
kind with the U.S. Gov't, so I could check their tax status. No answer.

In the early days of Dr. Tom's net presence here on csa2, most of the times
when I used my own channels to double-check Dr. Tom's stories, the response
was either non-confirming or contradictory to what it should have been had
Dr. Tom been acting legitimately.

Even when we asked Dr. Tom to just do the things he seemed to do well, like
answering questions on csa2, he couldn't get that right either. Sometimes he
would make some overly-optimistic claim about, say, one of Nathan's programs.
Nathan (who had previously gotten email from users who were mad because they
heard on usenet that something was released, yet they couldn't find it, or
they found an old version that didn't do what they heard it could do) would
come down hard on Dr. Tom for misrepresenting his programs. All too often
Dr. Tom would get prissy and attack Nathan, and flame wars would get going.

It bothers me a lot to see people here accusing Nathan of being the biggest
asshole around. He was not originally so cynical, and Dr. Tom played a major
role in sensitizing Nathan to misinformation of any kind, on any subject, no
matter how trivial, here in csa2.

Todd Whitesel
toddpw @ ugcs.caltech.edu