ben
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Mar 10, 2005, 1:45 AM
Post #5 of 8
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Re: [ross] What will happen with the HTMLArea forums?
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Abandonware, don't you just love it.... NOT!
Oh dear, well this is exactly why I have a strong preference for open source software, so this sort of thing doesn't happen!
Let me just say first of all, that I think Interactive tools is a very unique company in the way it offers very good tools for a very reasonable cost, and has a great attitude to customer support and user customisation etc.
When I was looking for a cheap-but-good news CMS program a couple of years ago I searched and searched for something that was open-source, so we would have maximum flexibility in modifying the program and customising it to suit our needs. I happened across Article Manager, and after much umming and ahhing, I decided it was worth going with the commercial product anyway as the cost was still pretty low, it was the best product I'd seen, and there was a great support forum with good interaction from Interactive Tools.
Now, I realise that HTMLArea was free, and unsupported etc etc, but if you release a product like that, you have to expect people are going to use it and integrate it with their systems! Specifically I integrated it with a Calendaring application called Calendarscript, and recommended it to others here: http://www.calendarscript.com/support/forum/Forum5/HTML/000139.html
A you can see this was 2 1/2 years ago, and I know for a fact that others have also used HTMLArea in their systems, as they have emailed me for help making it work (which I have). No doubt some of them have seen your other stuff and bought it too, so everyone's a winner!
The first I heard of HTMLArea being discontinued was somebody posting to that thread trying to find the download, and that it was discontinued.
So thats fine and everything, and of course it's entirely your right to discontinue HTMLArea, but what I think you should have done is NOT remove the download from your website altogether (what if people relying on this get corruption on their system, get hacked, lose it etc etc, and can't restore a working system) and NOT remove the forum with all the archives of past messages about HTMLArea, which was a very useful resource.
Sorry for the rant, but one of my pet peeves is people releasing a product, letting people use and rely on it, then yanking it away without any trace! If you're going to stop development of a product, GPL it, leave the source up for download, let people mirror it, THEN you can forget about it.
Regards,
Ben
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