Archiving Software

--------------Original Message---------------- Date: Sat, 17 Dec 2005 21:11:58 -0600 From: Jim Battle <frustum at pacbell.net> Subject: Re: Archiving Software (Dave wrote) (Tony Duell wrote) The logic of this, coming from an adult, is astounding. Dave can and is defending himself, but as a happy "customer" of his free tools, I can't let this slide by. I often use an analogy with my six year olds: imagine we are going to the ice cream store (which in our case is not often), and you really want strawberry ice cream. We get there only to find out they are all out of strawberry, but how about chocolate instead? Are you going to cry and whine that you want strawberry, or are you going to be happy that you are still getting a nifty chocolate one? That makes a lot more sense to them than the adage, "Don't look a gift horse in the mouth." Dave has worked selflessly to produce a professionally done, well documented program for the benefit of us all. It is peerless; there have been similar programs in the past, e.g. teledisk, but they are not actively developed and the resulting disk image format is not documented. Imagedisk works, it is free and is unencumbered by questions of the right to use. OK, we are not in utopia. Dave isn't comfortable releasing the source code ... yet. And yet you complain about it. You say judgementally that if *you* had written the program, the you'd certainly release the source code. That is great except you *haven't* spent the time to write the program. So until you go and do it, you are just posturing. ----------------Reply-------------- Amen/ditto that! Although I (still :) have a great deal of respect for Tony, I think an off-list note to Dave asking if he could look at the source code would have been more appropriate than his complaint. Then again, that seems to be a requirement for posting on this list, making sure there is always more complaining/kvetching etc. than kudos and appreciation... (except for model M IBM keyboards :) And that is Tony's oft-stated opinion after all, that if he doesn't have (or can't get/create) the inner details of whatever, he won't use it no matter how useful it might be, and this _is_ mostly a place for airing opinions... C'mon Tony, not even a tiny bit of respect for the great job Dave's done and continues to do, mostly for the benefit of the rest of us (some of whom just want to _use_ his excellent tools)? m