Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uwm.edu!uwvax!puff!rt20.cs.wisc.edu!blochowi
From: blochowi@rt20.cs.wisc.edu (Jason Blochowiak)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: Fairness (regarding ShrinkIt)
Message-ID: <3349@puff.cs.wisc.edu>
Date: 17 Oct 89 05:43:16 GMT
References: <3010@ndsuvax.UUCP>
Sender: news@puff.cs.wisc.edu
Reply-To: blochowi@rt20.cs.wisc.edu (Jason Blochowiak)
Organization: U of Wisconsin CS Dept
Lines: 44

In article <3010@ndsuvax.UUCP> nuwilken@ndsuvax.UUCP (Scott Wilken) writes:
>My god people....  Lay off Andy will you?
>I am in awe of his previous accomplishments concerning P8 ShrinkIt!'s.  I
	Me too, basically ;)
>know what a bummer it is to write programs that are relatively small, but
>he has written programs that took quite a bit of time and did it for FREE.
	Well, pretty much...
>After all the work his doing with Shrinkit gs, I dont think it is unfair at
>all for him to ask for a little compensation.  I dont recall anyone complaining
	Me either, basically ;)
>about what a sham ShrinkIt! was when you didnt have to pay for it.
> [Kudos to Andy McFadden regarding program x, which I agree with]
>I guess my point is, if you dont feel like paying for ShrinkIt!, fine...
>DONT, just dont complain about it....  Use the old one......
	Well, see, that's not entirely possible. As of System Disk 5.0, there
are these neat new things called Resource Forks (to paraphrase Doug Gwyn "One
of the worst design botches in OS history" - at least he said something like
that), which ShrinkIt 8 can't handle. This means that programs written that
use certain new features can't be archived with ShrinkIt. I'm currently working
on a small (it'll probably end up being ~30 blocks = ~15k) utility. The only
way to distribute it at the moment would be to pack an entire disk, which would
be something of a waste. And if I did use ShrinkIt GS (tm?), then only people
that owned ShrinkIt GS would be able to unpack & use MY utility. This would
seem to needlessly restrict the number of people that would be able to use my
utility. This is, of course, an annoyance. However, if Andy added a feature
to automatically prepend an executeable auto-extractor to ShrinkIt GS
archives, or released a simple extract-everything program as FreeWare, then I
don't think I would have any complaints left. I know that Andy spent one
HELL of a lot of time and sweat on ShrinkIt, and I do think that he should be
compensated for it. Now, if ShareWare actually worked, and people actually
paid for it, then he could've released it using that route. I think I've been
vocal enough about the failings of ShareWare in the Apple // market, so I
won't ramble on further about it here.

> [Some other stuff deleted...]
>Scott
>! Internet:  nuwilken@Plains.NoDak.EDU         America Online:  Wilken        !


--
                 Jason Blochowiak - back at school (again).
             blochowi@garfield.cs.wisc.edu or jason@madnix.UUCP

            "What's up pruneface?" - Bugs Bunny in the year 2000