Re: Yet another XyWrite mention

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

On 11/16/04, Jordan wrote:

≪NB purchased the rights to Xy...there is no reason why they would be
inclined to relinquish the old code. Doing so might even undermine their
patent, or something.≫

Well, perhaps not. After all, NB's stock in trade has always been the
apparatus criticus add-ons, Ibid and Orbis, no? Perhaps if they did not
have to struggle with bringing the basic XyWrite engine into the 32-bit
(and soon 64-bit) world, they could concentrate on their "core
competency" (as MBA-speak would put it). I believe the GPL does make
provision for add-ons that you can charge for. Meanwhile, Xy, properly
rewritten (i.e., in Assembler) to modern environments, could become a
starting point for a lot of other things, besides being the text
editor-word processor we all love: a programmer's editor (combined with
appropriate compilers; even I have managed some snazzy results by pairing
it with dBase 5 for DOS); a starting point for a character-based DTP app
(which is badly needed: if you want to print a text-only book you have to
wrestle with frames and overlays and masks and a whole lot of visual
stuff that is maddeningly unnituitable to a word person), XML output,
even PDF (well, we already have that with Ghostscript).

Patricia M. Godfrey
PMGodfrey@xxxxxxxx