[lug] A little FUD of our own

[Daniel Webb]

I was just remembering all the time I put into a program which depended
on IBM's ViaVoice SDK several years ago (which has since been pulled),
and it made me wonder:  is there a collection somewhere of horror
stories of people and companies being screwed by the downsides of
proprietary software (mainly, that it can be taken away)?  If not, that
might be a fun project to start.  Anyone have any good stories?  

There are several I know of but can't remember the details... if you
give me enough leads to go on, I'll do the research.

It just makes sense to me that if Microsoft is going around insinuating
that you'll be left high and dry when you have a problem with free/open
source software, people should be aware of what can happen with
proprietary software.  Here are a few I know about off the top of my
head:

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1) I'm sure I'm not the only one burned by ViaVoice being pulled...

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2) iCat Electronic Commerce Suite

"An example of this is the iCat Electronic Commerce Suite, which became
unprofitable and was bought out by Intel.  Intel dropped support for
iCat.  In the letter notifying users of this, the users were reminded
that the end-user licensing agreement was still in effect, preventing
copying or changing the software."

"We went to the iCat Web site and found that they had press releases
proudly announcing the 6500 stores built with their software"

<http://web.archive.org/web/20011126012524/http://www.arsdigita.com/books/building-community/infrastructure>
(find "about icat" in the page linked above)

original defunct link:<http://www.arsdigita.com/books/building-community/infrastructure>
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3) The CodeWright editor

"Without reservation, the finest text/source code editor I have used in
twenty-five years. I've used them all. -- MartySchrader"

<snip>

"According to http://www.borland.com/codewright/ Borland has
discontinued the development of CodeWright."

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?CodeWright

(Looks like it all everything, except that one all-important feature: forking)
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