Having been away for a while and then reading all of this on my return all I can hear is the sound of people furiously painting themselves into their own corners Richard will not write for SMSQ/E unless it is completely free or he gets paid a lot of money. Peter cannot get anyone else to write his drivers / improvements for him except Richard or someone else with a similar attitude. All of you spend a lot of time quoting acronyms and licences at one another and not one word of it is constructive or even close to a real discussion. In your fury to 'save' SMSQ/E you suddenly find yourselves each holding a few scraps of its flesh and saying 'there you are - I told you to back off and do it my way' while it bleeds to death. When it does you can hold up your clenched fist and say 'Ah but I tried to free the code!' and I am sure you will feel a lot better about it too. Someone might even believe you.
No licence is set in stone (as Steve Hall remarked to me on the day before I left for the US show) and you can always change it later if it proves not to work. Having seen an email from TT he leaves the ball pretty much in Wolfgang's and Jochen's court so I suggest you all calm down. Accept the current licence as it is and see how it works. I would state this again. For my part I expect to gain very little as a result of this commercial licence. We have already halved the price of the product and the phones are not exactly jammed. If you want to add a free upgrade to the existing code I will distribute it for free so I will not make a penny. If you want to add a paid upgrade I will pass on your fee to you. This will not make a profit for me at all. What it will mean is that code which is available from the approved sources is the approved and tested code and the user will at least have some guarantee that it will do the job and be consistent over all platforms which have sufficient hardware support for the features. You can have free 'Open Source' code and Richard et al will write for it and Marcel and a few others will quit or you can have the current licence and the opposite will happen. I will hazard a guess that there are more QPC users than the whole of the UQLX/Qxxx scene put together (with a few crossovers) but we do not want this split. This is not a fantasy, I have spoken with many of these parties. OK, I have been quiet for a while because I was away. This is how I feel. The QL scene does not make any money for me - it has cost me money in the last two years. I am trying to support as many of the users as I can and the same goes for Jochen and many others who are still active, spend the money to get to shows in foreign countries and, in general, make an effort. -- Roy Wood Q Branch, 20 Locks Hill Portslade. Sussex. BN41 2LB. UK Tel : +44 (0)1273 386030 Fax : +44 (0)1273 430501 (New number!) Mobile +44(0)7836 745501 Web : www.qbranch.demon.co.uk
