I appreciate the welcome from Steve and Thomas, it is nice to know that people spend time reading and answering emails in this group in a friendly and positive way.
I have not been schooled in formal coding, what I have learned has been self taught and studying others codes and examples, I suppose school would be a great alternative choice to learn but then again its costly and takes the fun out of discovery and learning. I started last year in the development of web design and have found that even though I know there is a lot to learn still even in my skills in HTML that I love to develop and push myself to learn and create things I can be proud of. Delphi has definitely provided me with the type of environment that challenges thought and development. I spent the better part of last year reading and picking apart web sites, and learning how people have approached design techniques. The interesting part of all this is to move line by line through the code and figure out how each line works in relation to others. I find that through this method, I learn much faster. The purpose in the original questions I posed yesterday is two-fold, because I read so much code and take it apart to understand how people manipulate computers to do what they are told, I find that even the pages of script in web design tend to take on the same shape as code I have studied to learn the scripting language I'm working in. That's not to say that I intentionally copy or slightly change code to make it my own however in a different Delphi yahoo group I gentleman brought up the same sort of questions I wondered about, that is. and I quote the other group. " Hello, I have been accused of steeling source code from an old 1999 DOS Borland Pascal Program to create a Delphi Application. I'm trying to figure out how to do a comparison to prove my code is my own. The issue is that the code is so different that its hard to know where to start. The DOS program is a DOS program, it doesn't have any windows components, no VCL, no forms. It has a propritary flat file database. The only way it can be compiled is to use a virtual DOS 6.22 machine. It is no longer sold, it runs as a legacy program on very old PCs. The Delphi application is a normal Delphi application that uses the MSDE version of Sql Server. These are both large programs, 125,000 lines or more. They both have multiple source code units. I know without looking that there will not be common unit names or organization. I don't expect to find common function names. So far all that can be seen are pdf versions of their DOS source code. They claim that if we put a virtual machine together we can see the source in its correct form. Does anyone have any idea of how to do this comparison quickly and efficently? I'm not even sure if files from the virtual machine will be able to be compared to files on the regular hard drive. I'm almost to the point of hand scanning all the units and collecting metrics of some kind." I suppose what I wonder is what line is drawn between copyright materials such as the material described in that email, and what makes this interesting and worse at the same time is that obviously the code should not be even remotely close to each other based solely on the major differences in operating systems. I could be wrong about that, however, the questions remain. yes this is a much larger and I'm sure a labour intensive project, (I know Thomas your growling at me, being a president of a software development company) but what other issues could be happening here to say that u stole my code, and more importantly although a far stretch, the traditional "hello world" code used to teach beginners how to "create your first program" in the first chapter in any idiots guide to programming or scripting could also be declared a copy right infringement if someone could figure out how to use the sentence in a retail production and distributable code. What stops the treat of being harassed by companies claiming you have stolen their code, and the term of good programming? I would think that although there is many ways to get to the same result, or sometimes there is only one way to develop the result (ex. "hello world") what's to say I could not develop the same code knowing or not knowing the other source code existed. And in the same breath. what's protecting developers from the re-use of their code. and what's the appropriate time frame in which someone could use code similar to the code they found from 7 or 8 years ago and using it to benefit their requirements now? I am currently planning two software development strategies and plans, and I worry that one day someone will track my new butt down and accuse me of using the same sort of generic no-brainer code that is a much better short cut then what I originally planned. Furthermore, unlike the scripting languages (except php where the code is hidden more or less) compiled Delphi files regardless of the programming language, contains codes where u cant see the credits anyways of where that code module came from. How do you deal with that in your day to day programming or is it something that is kept hush hush unless someone rings an alarm on you? I certainly would like to explore this in detail in this group, and to see how others deal or don't deal with similar situations. On the next note and I know I'm blowing a bunch of email fauxpas' but I am thinking I have found a great wealth of information in the responses I have seen so far, I would like to ask one more massive and really ugly question for people like Thomas' and others who have the ability to make decisions on price and marketing custom software solutions, I would like to know how I would get started in custom application building and how do u charge clients for the services you offer? Is it mostly dependant on the uniqueness of the project and the size of the target market for that particular program? What sort of jobs would I be able to find if I wanted to get in over my head in programming? Does it pay better to work for a major company? Or software development process being developed by one person.and distributed? Any thoughts would be appreciate Paul [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
