[lug] A little FUD of our own

[Dhruva B. Reddy]

The term for proprietary software that has been pulled is "abandonware".
You may want to Google for this, and you may find this of interest:

	http://brasslantern.org/community/companies/warez.html

Dhruva

On Thu, 17 Feb 2005 at 20:32 -0700, Daniel Webb soliloquized thusly:
> 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
>