Hello, Michiel.

Thursday May 19 2011 at 21:47, you wrote to me:

 MV> I have tried to contact Charles several times in the past year. Even
 MV> tried the "fellow FTSC member" aproach. (He is an ex-FTSC
member.) My
 MV> objective was to try to talk him into letting go of the source so that
 MV> someone else could continue. I never got a reply, I have given up. :-(


Evidently he has his phone number published somewhere that most of us
wouldn't know where to look.  I think he's taken the same route that Tim
Strike, the author of Telegard BBS took: I'm making real money now after
college, the hell with the people that use my BBS programs since I'm not
making any money off of it.

I was told by someone that has been around a while and I know I can trust
that Charles specifically had said to this person that a) he had lost the
source code and b) even if he had the source code, he couldn't release it
since it used a couple of commercial programming libraries that were
registered in his name.  So I'm hearing two or three different stories from
people and quite frankly, I've lost a lot of respect for Charles since
while he's still an active NC and has an active BBS, he can't take five
damn minutes to tell his paying customers what is going on with his program
and/or its support.

Only when I started bandying around threats of wanting my money back did he
bother to show up in this echo, irate at me, and offering me my money back.
 I told him then, as I'm speaking now, all I want is the "straight
dope" of what's really happening with Internet Rex.

I can understand that his family and work absorb a lot of his time, but
screwing over people who believed in you when you were a
"starving" college student isn't exactly a good way to conduct
yourself and it sure the hell isn't a good way to treat people who PAID you
to have a reasonably NON-BUGGY program.

How damn hard would it be for him to create a dynamically-linked Linux
version and fix the bugs in the email and FTP server?  If he did that and
then said, "Okay, I'm done with Internet Rex", I think many of us
could understand.  Or as you said, he could perhaps give the code to
someone trusted to continue developing Internet Rex "under
license".

I might have a reputation for being cranky, but it's common sense and the
polite thing to do when it's involving paying customers.  At least Tim
Strike had come on my BBS and announced to the world that Telegard BBS
software was dead so we all knew where we stood with it.  It's ironic that
he'll take people's money still but won't do anything until he's pushed or
pissed off.

I mean, if he didn't want to develop the program anymore and didn't want to
open source it, at least release a "freeware" key so other people
can use it. I don't think it's right for people to pay for software and get
zilch for support.

I know there's several BBS-related programmers in this very echo that while
they do not charge for their programs to be used, I know that if something
happened that they could not develop their programs anymore, they would at
least make an announcement to explain what's going on.

All we get is silence and rumors.  Yet Charles gets pissed when he hears of
"key sharing" because most people I know think Internet Rex is
DOA.  If he was just fairly active and let people know what's going on,
that wouldn't happen now would it?


I'll leave the subject alone after this message.  I think I put my feelings
across pretty clearly on this subject. :)  I still like Internet Rex, I
still feel I got my money's worth, but you know, it amazes me that people
are still registering the door and Charles is still doing stuff he was
doing ten years ago.

Later,
Sean

... All things are possible except skiing through a revolving door.
--- GoldED/2 3.0.1