| Editorial: Licensing Ourselves into a Corner | Jayhawk |
It's hard to believe, but in about six months, our friends at ticalc.org will celebrate being online for ten years. Some of us have been in active in the community for ten years or even longer. And back in 1996 the community was led by some humble calculator enthusiasts and had a small following of gamers. In some respects, it's not very different from the community now. But the community has taken an interesting road to get where we are today.
Back in 1996, the TI-85 was the calculator most enthusiasts had with the TI-92 having hit the market not long ago. Neither of these calculators is in production and neither has much development done for them anymore. The first shell for any calculator was Zshell. Through a few hacks, Zshell allowed execution of assembly language programs stored in strings. Assembly language games ran far faster than their TI-BASIC counterparts and many programmers took up authoring games for Zshell. Over the next few years, the community exploded with new games and new calculators to program for. And with it sprang up several sites such as Ti-Files, Dimension-TI, Ti-News, and a multitude of programming groups.
Unfortunately, sometime after the turn of the century, the community started to become stagnant. There was already a large assortment of software created and most of the new calculators were rather unimpressive. Every high-end TI calculator, even now, is an enhanced version of the TI-83, TI-85, TI-89, or TI-92 Plus. There have been almost no radical changes in calculators such as what went on during the late 1990s. And with the lack of new calculators and new games, many programming groups and sites closed up and were forgotten. And they weren't replaced with new programmers and new sites. There are as many gamers as there has ever been in the community, but the sites and programmers have dwindled.
When ticalc.org, Ti-Files, and Dimension-TI were at their height, programmers typically submitted their work to archives on all three sites. Three separate file archives were maintained, all of which had a different look and feel. And all of these archives were of a high quality. Ti-Files is gone, never to return. Dimension-TI is a shadow of its former self and its future looks bleak. That leaves ticalc.org as the lone file archive with programs remaining from that era.
In the case of both Ti-Files and Dimension-TI, the creators and management of the sites moved on to other things and left their sites to others who didn't keep the sites running to their previous high standards. And one day it's likely that the staff at ticalc.org will move on as well and turn the site over to others. Despite ticalc.org's longevity, it's absurd to think that ticalc.org will be around forever. And should ticalc.org ever decide to close its doors, many of the programs in their archives will be lost permanently.
It might seem easy enough for someone to create a backup of the files in ticalc.org's archives and create their own repository for calculator software. And such a thing might be a good service to the community. Unfortunately, this will never happen. Many programmers get offended when a site puts a program in their archives without the consent of the programmer. And because of copyright laws, they have the legal authority to force the site to remove the programs. Because of this, it is unreasonable to expect that any site will ever be able to make a backup of the programs in ticalc.org's archives.
We've licensed ourselves into dependence on a single site which thankfully has stayed open for ten years and is in no danger of closing. But should the unthinkable ever happen and ticalc.org's staff move on like the staff of just about every other site in the history of the community, a large volume of software will be lost forever. It might seem reasonable to a programmer to protect his or her work and restrict who can distribute it. But this very attitude might cause the work of a lot of programmers to be permanently lost. |
| 2 Jan 2006, 18:27 GMT |
