Re: not just a labor of love

"Julian Lighton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message
news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
> Fred Gitelman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> >I have no desire to be involved in an open source project.
> >That is not the way I work and I know I would not enjoy
> >my work if the project were open source.
>
> I think you may be being hasty in rejecting the concept out of hand;
> there are many open source projects, and the way things are done in
> them varies widely. Odds are it wouldn't change the way you worked
> much at all.

You could be right, but I have worked on projects
with groups of other programmers before and I have
never enjoyed the experience.

Right now I love my job and (I think at least) I have
been successful. I don't want to mess with this unless
I have no choice.

> >I have no interest in spending my time and money to
> >support platforms that are used by a small minority of
> >bridge players,
>
> It's your call, and I have no idea what market research you've done,
> but I'd think that getting into the Mac market could well be
> worthwhile, considering how underserved they are in the bridge
> software business. This would be especially true if the you could get
> the port done mostly for free. (No idea how likely this is, even if
> you released the source.)

I probably good get this done mostly for free (at least
in terms of money).

Problem is that it would be far from free in terms of
my time. The nature of the (badly written and uncommented)
existing Windows code is that I would have to be intimately
involved in any rewrite for another platform. I simply do
not have time for this right now.

This could change in the future, but my personal hope is
that Windows emulators will become good enough, cheap
enough, and widely distributed enough so that I will not
have to deal with this.

Fred Gitelman
Bridge Base Inc.
www.bridgebase.com