MV Freeware and Open Source

[Tony Gravagno]

Anyone know where Tom Phillips went? His website disappeared - along
with a fine collection of code and notes that he published. The site
of Leon Wooldridge is also gone, along with about 350 BASIC utilities.

We've seen this happen in the past - someone with a site dies or loses
interest. Everything goes away or it's left to someone who doesn't
maintain it, and it's all lost forever.

The http://www.pickwiki.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Freeware page has links to
many sites where freeware is available. Of course the risk of not
hosting on the wiki itself is that if the other sites go away (like
those above) the community loses the resources. For this reason many
programs are hosted in the wiki.

Freeware, especially Free and Open Source Software, may be available
to answer a lot of those HowTo questions that we see in these forums.
When you need to solve a problem, check PickWiki and linked sites to
see if something is already there.

Would anyone want to head a project to assemble all available MV
freeware over at PickWiki? I'll help, but I can't drive this.

I just published a couple new utilities on my own freeware page.
- One migrates entire accounts from one system to another to via
AccuTerm. I can provide details if required.
- Another program merges and splits Included code for easy editing and
debugging. I use this all the time, including on the save/restore
program where the total code is >32k which R83 can't handle.

I also provided Kevin King of Precision Software with an update to his
fine XBASIC utility which allows a single program to include code for
multiple platforms. Run XBASIC on the code to enable a target
platform, then just recompile. This eliminates the need for multiple
code sets.

Note the spirit of free and open source software - get it, enhance it,
give it back. The model usually breaks down somewhere in that second
or third part.

See the PickWiki link above for links to Precision Software and Nebula
R&D.

Thanks.

Tony Gravagno
Nebula Research and Development
TG@ remove.pleaseNebula-RnD.com
Nebula R&D sells mv.NET and other Pick/MultiValue products
worldwide, and provides related development services
remove.pleaseNebula-RnD.com/blog
Visit http://PickWiki.com! Contribute!
http://Twitter.com/TonyGravagno

[dmm]

I have a pdf (or .doc file) I think might fit in the 'howto' section -
but there seems to be no provision for such files?

On Feb 15, 10:58 am, Tony Gravagno <bacj8kp...@snkmail.com> wrote:
<snip>
> Thehttp://www.pickwiki.com/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?Freewarepage has links to

> many sites where freeware is available. Of course the risk of not
> hosting on the wiki itself is that if the other sites go away (like
> those above) the community loses the resources.  For this reason many
> programs are hosted in the wiki.

<snip>

[Tony Gravagno]

dmm wrote:
> I have a pdf (or .doc file) I think might fit in the 'howto' section -
> but there seems to be no provision for such files?

That's correct. As time permits (and it doesn't right now) a few of us
were trying to migrate the PickWiki site to a new MediaWiki base which
would support file uploads and a ton of other valued features. So for
now that kind of content does need to be hosted off-site. If you
email it to me I'll be happy to see what I can do. Or just provide a
link here or off-list to your own repository (website, DropBox,
whatever) and I'll update the freeware wiki page.

Tony Gravagno
TG@ remove.pleaseNebula-RnD.com