[lug] A little FUD of our own

[Paul E Condon]

I don't know any of the specifics of the situation, but I understand
that Federal Gov't research agencies (NASA, NSF, DOE, etc.) have been
screwed several times by the demise of a corporation dedicated to a
proprietary design supercomputer. When the company went bust, the 
source code for the special OS disappeared, and million dollar hardware
was suddenly worthless. My impression is (totally from outsider info
only) that push to Beowulf was largely motivated by desire to avoid
being screwed yet again.

Perhaps others on this list can offer more specifics. Or correct me
if I am mistaken.

On Thu, Feb 17, 2005 at 08:32:18PM -0700, Daniel Webb wrote:
> 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:
> 
> ----
> 1) I'm sure I'm not the only one burned by ViaVoice being pulled...
> 
> ----
> 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>
> ----
> 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)
> ----
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Web Page:  http://lug.boulder.co.us
> Mailing List: http://lists.lug.boulder.co.us/mailman/listinfo/lug
> Join us on IRC: lug.boulder.co.us port=6667 channel=#colug

-- 
Paul E Condon           
pecondon at mesanetworks.net