Re: Website TTG

["J. R. Fox" jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

"M.W. Poirier" wrote:

>  Since so many of us feel this way, I wonder if it would be timely if
>  one of us explored the possibility of reconstituting the lost TTG
>  files at some other location on the net. This, of course, would re-
>  quire that we obtained the approval of the owners of XYWrite, which
>  they may be willing to grant (if it is made clear that they are not
>  responsible for problems that many result from the use of the
>  programme), seeing as they placed the files at the disposal of the
>  public on their former Web sight.

When a software product like this is no longer sold, on the market, or otherwise
available -- and that certainly includes a lot of the old DOS stuff -- I feel
very little in the way of moral compunction re the prospect of sharing it with
other users who have a real interest in obtaining it. At the same time, I
consider that there is a significant difference between this and making the item
publicly available, without the owner's consent, to any and all comers. The
suggestion put forward here recently in that regard (by Patricia, I think) is
too oblivious to the nature of intellectual property and the reality of
copyright law. If you're going to distribute something, you should have
permission to do so. And I think it is a good, correct, and generous thing for
the copyright holders of now defunct products to release them to the public
domain, with the proviso that they not be used for resale or commercial gain, a
disclaimer of any further support for, or responsibility for the use of that
product. A model for this can perhaps be found in the case of many OS/2 app.s
and util.s that once were commercial-ware or shareware, and became
"abandon-ware," as OS/2 became marginalized into a small niche market. In many
cases I can think of, the author formally released the product, and the
remaining user base was much better off for it.

>  More generally, I find it rather disconcerting that some of the finest
>  DOS programmes, many of them superior to their Windows counterparts,
>  are no longer available when either the company that produced them goes
>  out of business, or when the company moves on to a Windows version of
>  the programme.

>  I can readily think of a number of DOS programmes that were outstanding
> when they were
>  produced, and that are still superior to anything available in Windows.
>  They may not look as colourful on screen, but I defy anyone to identify
>  whether the outcome was produced by a DOS or a Windows programme.

Couldn't agree with you more. I have quite a few DOS util.s that are unique to
this day, or have never been improved upon. They are compact, direct, and to
the point. Windows imposes various layers of abstraction and bloat on so many
of these things (as opposed to driving basic hardware functions directly), which
only manage to get in the way, create new things that can go wrong, or introduce
security risks. And the more critical stuff you place on top of Windows, the
more the reliability is akin to building a luxury hotel on top of quicksand.

>  Fortunately two or three of these DOS gems are still available (Lotus
>  Agenda and Magellan), but try to get the elegant outliner Grandview 2.0.
>  I hope that XYWrite does not go this way.

Some of these programs can still be purchased, used, from places like Recycled
Software and Ebay. The main thing you may have to be concerned about is whether
today's processors are too fast to run them. I have had this happen a few
times, with things like an older version of the Textbridge OCR software, which I
had purchased because it was the last version that would run directly under
OS/2. When the program won't come up, and you get a "Divide Overflow" error
message, five will get you ten that that is the problem.

>  Sorry about this rant (it won't happen again), but like many of you, I'm
>  a convinced DOS person, and I hate what is happening to DOS programmes.

Nothing to be sorry about: you're right.


Jordan