Posted by Robert G Laurin on January 25, 2004 at 19:29:14:
Since 1993 I have been maintaining the Comet Editor (CED). In that period of 10 years, 20 different versions of CED were released.
Most of these were either bug fixes or some little enhancements that I added for the benefits of Comet programmers including myself.
Now, Signature is working with Ultra-Edit, a Windows based editor.
Version 04.01 of CED is ready to be released. The 2 years of changes included in this release was never requested by Signature but were really included to allow us the Comet programmers (starting with me) to keep up with the reality of the changes happening in Comet.
So I ask you, the Comet users, developers and dealers. Would you be willing to participate financially to support the continuing development of product such as CED? What about all of those other products that could find a new home in the "source code library"? I for one, have lots of routines and programs that I wrote in the last twenty some years that I have been involved with the Q-Box and Comet. I often see post where people ask about such routines or trick.
I am considering a "voluntary" system where a small token amount could be sent to the author/owner of such routines. Would you be willing to stick a twenty in an envelope for continuing use of CED? Before you say "sure" I dare ask, would you really do it? I for one, used sharewares but very seldom went the extra mile and reward the author but I often thought that I should.
For your information, to prepare CED in a deliverable package takes a few hours. Making sure all the programs are properly compiled, that all the documentation and help files are present, that all temporary work files are purged, that the CED control file is properly cleaned, that the change logs are complete and accurate.
The same thing happened recently when someone asked for a piece of a routine that I kindly offered, taking the piece of code out of an existing system and package it so it is a self-sustain sub-system requires some efforts.
Signature agrees with this approach. I need to know what do you think?
Please! Give me some feedback.