Anybody have $35K to $89K to spend...

[John Foust]

At 07:21 AM 8/13/2004, Ram Meenakshisundaram wrote:
>Aladdin 4D is now on ebay (with source and full rights):
>http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=2992&item=3693574489&
>rd=1&ssPageName=WDVW

Kermit's a nice reliable guy and Alladin 4D a reasonable product 
in its day, but $35K?  

A number of Amiga companies with nice products fire-saled for 
much less than that, many years ago.  I think I remember bidding 
on a fire sale or two.  My plan was to sell CDs of the entire 
product lines with source code.

A number of these businesses never found buyers - and then what?  
All that code starts to rot.  Knowledge of the development 
environment disappears.  I had a number of friends whose 
small-time Amiga software businesses just faded painfully 
and slowly.  The time to port was nine years ago.

If there's any hope to squeeze money out of old code like this, 
I believe it is in releasing the code so others can enhance it, 
and the original developer hangs around hoping for contract-work 
to adapt it to other uses.  Not necessarily complete surrender
via open source, but let other eyeballs savor it.

Porting to a new OS and GUI can take a long time.  Even if someone
bought it for $35K, they'd need to expend at least a similar amount in
time and effort (if not salary).  Even at $0 buying price, someone
would need to spend the equivalent of another $35K in terms of a 
lot of time and effort to develop a port.

In my own case, in 1992 or so I knew that a Windows or Unix port 
was the only way to salvation outside the Amiga market.  I had to
wait until 1995 for Win32s to make it possible, although I'd
tried other 32-bit extenders.  And by 1997, the threat of licensing
my entire 350K-line, five-platform source code tree at $70K a pop
was one of the reasons that my company was bought-out.  The buyer 
didn't want other companies to get it.

- John