Subj : Re: Synchronet vs. Mystic
To   : Jas Hud
From : Nick Andre
Date : Tue May 10 2022 12:06 pm

On 10 May 22  10:47:28, Jas Hud said the following to Nick Andre:

JH> if you want to talk about the original conversation, whats wrong with payin
JH> for something and having the author drop it.  did you buy a subscription?
JH> you expect someone to kiss your ass because you paid a few bucks?

Many people bought license keys for Irex. I was one of them. There was no 
question that for a time the software filled a need and worked very well. You 
would most certainly agree with your 20 years of computer skillz.

Now I understand if its mentally challenging for you to entertain the idea of
"software support" because you love free keys, but Charles was in a fact a
very active developer who led people to believe he would support his products
that people were paying him decent money for. Sadly that was not the case.

When he vanished from the scene, he left a 3rd-party gateway in place for a 
time to accept payments for his software. It looked odd to many Sysops here to
continue to accept payments for something that is no longer supported. Most
other Fido authors were decent enough to release keys or keygens as freeware.

The problem was not the lack of support, but the way Charles left with no
exit-strategy in place for his popular software. Irex is functionally limited 
unless you *PAY* for a license key. Its hard to do that now with the payment 
gateway apparently shut down.

I know you'll be Captain Obvious now and say "keys are available if you look 
for them" but that doesn't change the fact that its abandonware which one 
cannot register in their OWN NAME unless one is a hex-editing Rain Man genius.

Irex has many bugs that will never be fixed, including a DNS dependancy 
problem on Linux. Which is why maaaaaaaaaaany people ditched that abandonware 
and went with the open-source BinkD project or stuff based from it. D'Bridge, 
Argus, Taurus, MIS in Mystic, Synchronet, MBSE, etc etc...

Irex has a problem that affects future developers - you know, that "community"
you like to bring up - where if you write a BinkD mailer you must take into 
account the idiosyncratic ways that Irex does handshaking. G00R00 wrote many
detailed first-hand accounts of this problem.

The Irex debacle has been discussed so many times in Fidonet and in the IREX
echo which I'm sure TJ carries on his board for you to read up on. If TJ's
backlog of mail doesn't go far enough, mine does.

Nick

--- Renegade vY2Ka2
 * Origin: Joey, do you like movies about gladiators? (1:229/426)

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