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From: john13@garfield.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Chickens vs Eggs
Message-ID: <3479@garfield.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 18-Feb-87 18:24:06 EST
Article-I.D.: garfield.3479
Posted: Wed Feb 18 18:24:06 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 20-Feb-87 01:14:10 EST
Organization: CS Dept., Memorial U. of Newfoundland, St. John's
Lines: 28
Summary: how are they related via the space-time continuum?

[]

I've noticed lately a lot of commercial products very similar in appearance
to PD programs I've gotten from the net - or is it the other way around?

Some examples are Matt Dillon's Shell <-> Metacompco Shell,
		  some Zing utilities <-> PopCLI, saveilbm, browsers
and lately	  Matt's Med	      <-> Professional Text Engine

You people who are writing PD stuff (or commercial stuff, as the case may be),
in your experience is it usually the case that someone looks at a commercial
product and says "Hey, that isn't so hard to do", or someone sees a PD
program and says "Hey, this is a good idea which people would pay money for."

I know that I (in my programming infancy) can write programs to simulate
most of the functions of DPaint I, so I would tend to think the former.
However, if I was to ever try and market something that I had produced, I
think that I would probably find that many of my techniques (and in some
cases whole sections of code) had been extracted from public domain offerings.

Note 1: I am not saying anyone is ripping off anyone else's ideas; I'm just
        curious about the whole thing.

Note 2: If you have Zing! or know somebody who does, invoke the browser from
        the CLI with no arguments (it's called ztypea) and read the error
        message.

John