Re: [SLUG] GGRRR (not really linux related)

From: Paul M Foster (paulf@quillandmouse.com)
Date: Thu May 10 2001 - 18:38:54 EDT


On Wed, May 09, 2001 at 07:13:13PM -0400, Glen Canaday wrote:

>
> <rant>
>
> I'm *really* trying to keep my attitude about M$ under wraps. I work at a
> software company that sells a program that runs only on, you guessed it,
> Windows. I just got a copy of the source to this program today (under NDA, of
> course) and the damn interface is written in VB 3!! This is a thousand dollar
> app and that lazy ******* programmer didn't even have the decency to use MFC
> so that the interface can be changed as the program evolves. The Visual C++
> ide he used's environment is modeled after a Unix environment - proof can be
> found by the simple use of make and quite a few matching command line
> switches which I bet at least 80% of those who code apps for Windows never
> even notice. This code is wrought with gotos and lacks even the least
> explanatory comments. I wanted to port this as it would fill a hole in Linux
> that's not likely to be filled by anyone else any time soon, but to do that,
> I'll have to rewrite 60% of it from scratch. I'm not even sure I can do it
> now. If the Windows developers write in a style anything like this, it's
> amazing they have not been sentenced to life in an oubliette, so they can
> stew over what wrongs they have commited against the software development
> community for all eternity.
>
> </rant>
>
> I think I'm ok now.

A word of caution here. When people like Digital Research coded DRDOS,
they did it in a "clean room" environment, so that no one could accuse
them of copying code. They didn't have access to the source for MSDOS,
and could only go by the published APIs and whatever research they could
do. In your case, having seen the source code, if you should code a
replacement program like this, you're painting a target on yourself for
hungry litigators and vengeful software companies.

But you already knew that, right?

Paul



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Fri Aug 01 2014 - 18:14:51 EDT