En/Je/On 2011-12-08 15:43, Malcolm Lear escribió / skribis / wrote : > I really can't believe we are still > stuck with this out of date ridiculous licence that's killing any > chance of a future for SMSQ/E.
In my opinion, that's the main point we must be conscius of: There's no future this way. The QL platform will die with us, the people who use(d) the actual computer. Beside my personal use, I see no motivation for writing software for a commercial system (SMSQ/E) that people actually and practically cannot use. There are too many free alternatives out there... We have several emulators to run old software. That's nice and great. But, beside unremarkable exceptions, only we (the old QL users) are interested in running old QL programs... To be able to run old programs is necessary to preserve the legacy, but it's not enough to survive. I want to remark a especially sad aspect I see in this situation: Today a lot of people write new and interesting programs for old platforms... and everybody can use them because there are many free emulators for those systems. But many (if not all) old platforms of the 1980s and 1990s are not powerful enough to for the modern needs, so people write for them more or less the same kind of software they wrote in the old times, mainly games. On the contrary, the QL system has evolved a lot since it was born. Of course it cannot compete with current native solutions in many fields, but it has many nice features and it's powerful enough to be a suitable alternative in certain software projects. But in practice any new programs (even free and gratis) could not be published because the needed system to run them is commercial... Marcos -- http://programandala.net _______________________________________________ QL-Users Mailing List http://www.q-v-d.demon.co.uk/smsqe.htm
