At 07:21 AM 8/13/2004, Ram Meenakshisundaram wrote:
>Aladdin 4D is now on ebay (with source and full rights):
>http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=2992&item=3693574489&
>rd=1&ssPageName=WDVW
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
Received on Fri Aug 13 2004 - 11:59:36 BST