Well, I've certainly learned a valuable lesson; now that I know that, if I ever spend as much time as Dave has developing something useful for the CC community, I will actually cause harm unless I release the source code (whether I think it's ready for prime time or not), I'll certainly keep it to myself. By this "logic" every company or individual that releases a piece of software without source code is causing harm by keeping someone else from writing their own version. Perhaps it's time for a class-action law suit or two... Whoever was writing the other archiver was certainly free to use Dave's well-documented format or, if he/she really had a better idea, implementing it and presenting that to the community, with source of course. Also, the person with that pile of "hard-to-find disks" is free to use any other tool they like in whatever format they choose; if they choose not to because they don't have Dave's source, that's hardly Dave's fault. Then again, blaming someone else for your own choices seems to be pretty popular these days. It's unfortunate, but I don't blame Dave one bit. We do this sort of thing in order to help other people and when we get more criticism (often unjustified) than appreciation, it really isn't worth our while; I don't think he's B&Ming, he's just saying hey, if you don't like it, by all means do it yourself; I don't need the crap. I've said it before: every time we discourage someone with the self-important opinionating, criticism, sarcasm, OT rambling etc. that seems to be so common on some computer lists, our community loses a potentially valuable resource. I just hope there's some way without too much effort to salvage the archiving that Jim (and others?) have done. mike <Shaking head & rolling eyes...> ----------------Original Message---------------- Date: Mon, 19 Dec 2005 23:43:39 -0500 (EST) From: der Mouse <mouse at Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA> Subject: Re: ImageDisk project is canceled And not a word about how lovely and mature Dave is to take his marbles and go home in a snit - reneging on his earlier statement (I'd even say "commitment") that he'd make the source available when he was no longer able or willing to maintain it himself, I might note - because someone points out that he's _wrong_ in thinking that no harm is done by ivory-tower "you'll get it when I think it's good and ready" development? I went back and reread the note that Dave is (apparently) reacting to: < I am not sure you've done no harm by so doing... I know for a fact < that at least one person was working on an open-source disk archiver, < but has dropped that project, at least for the moment, because he < doesn't want to create yet another incompatible file format, and < would have wanted to see how you did things (not wasting time < re-inventing the wheel and all that). We'd all better hope his pile < of hard-to-find disks [...] remain[s] readable a little longer. This hardly qualifies as bitching and moaning to me, with the *possible* exception of the last sentence. Of course, Dave's choice of reaction to this information is up to him. But really, after rereading the full note I quoted from (there's a good deal more to it, but I don't think the above is unrepresentative - I'd call it all fair and polite criticism), and rereading Dave's reaction, it's pretty clear to me which one is more "bitching and moaning". Yes, I too hope Dave reconsiders. But I don't think stifling fair criticism - and that's what I think it was - because its target reacts badly to it is ever a good idea. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B