Re: Pipe dreams

[urqurw@xxxxxxxx (Russ W. Urquhart)]

Just a couple of thoughts:

First, i just found out, as a newbie, that there are some of the developers of
Xy on this list! guys, you have made a tremendous product! Thanks for the great
work.

Secondly, I would be curious about somethings. If some of you remember the wp
Multimate from Ashton-Tate. That product, while never explicitly stating it
in their documentation, was, essentially, the Wang dedicated wp, ported to the
PC. They offered conversion from Wang, and other wp's, to Multimate and acted
exactly like the Wang. (So much so that we at TI, at the time, were able to use
it to do some documentation.)
In either case, i'm wondering out loud, what would keep someone from writing
a wp that acted like Xy, accepted Xy files, could export Xy files, and for
all intents and purposes was like Xy except was deviod of mentioning explicitly
that it was a Xy emulator? This could be done ala abisource or for profit. I
mean the Gnu Linux, for example, emulates Unix, but in spite of being clean
from the ground up, it acts just like unix. Several gnu efforts for other
applications have also started (Gimp, abiword, OpenDos, etc.) is there anything
legally that would/could keep such an effort from happening?

I seem to recall reading that some of the original developers of Wordperfect
split off to create a smaller wp called Justwrite.

I'm sure that i don't know all the inner workings of Xy & TTG, but it just
seems kind of a shame that it doesn't look like much is happening with Xy
and its future.

my 2 cents!


Russ