Anybody have $35K to $89K to spend...

At 07:21 AM 8/13/2004, Ram Meenakshisundaram wrote: Kermit's a nice reliable guy and Alladin 4D a reasonable product in its day, but $35K? A number of Amiga companies with nice products fire-saled for much less than that, many years ago. I think I remember bidding on a fire sale or two. My plan was to sell CDs of the entire product lines with source code. A number of these businesses never found buyers - and then what? All that code starts to rot. Knowledge of the development environment disappears. I had a number of friends whose small-time Amiga software businesses just faded painfully and slowly. The time to port was nine years ago. If there's any hope to squeeze money out of old code like this, I believe it is in releasing the code so others can enhance it, and the original developer hangs around hoping for contract-work to adapt it to other uses. Not necessarily complete surrender via open source, but let other eyeballs savor it. Porting to a new OS and GUI can take a long time. Even if someone bought it for $35K, they'd need to expend at least a similar amount in time and effort (if not salary). Even at $0 buying price, someone would need to spend the equivalent of another $35K in terms of a lot of time and effort to develop a port. In my own case, in 1992 or so I knew that a Windows or Unix port was the only way to salvation outside the Amiga market. I had to wait until 1995 for Win32s to make it possible, although I'd tried other 32-bit extenders. And by 1997, the threat of licensing my entire 350K-line, five-platform source code tree at $70K a pop was one of the reasons that my company was bought-out. The buyer didn't want other companies to get it. - John