A plea has been made for Amiga freeware programmers to release the source code to their developments. What follows is a copy of the email sent to authors of Aminet program authors and uploaders:
No doubt you have noticed the current sad state of the Amiga. The number of people that still create software for it has grown very small (and it is quite likely you are no longer among them). A rebirth is in the making, but whether this will work remains to be seen.
However, some people are willing to make it happen. They want the Amiga to be a viable platform again. And for this to happen, that future Amiga will need two things that are closely related: users, developers and software. This is a classic chicken'n'egg situation: users attract developers; developers write software; software attracts users.
Fortunately, there is something you can do to help break this circle.
Much of the software on Aminet is in binary form only. Porting it to the new Amiga will only be possible after a complete rewrite. However, the process of porting could be greatly sped up if source was available. And that is why I am asking you to upload your sources to Aminet.
As I see it, there are three advantages to this scheme:
- Your software will live on, and continue to make people happy.
- Maintenance and upgrades will be possible for current Amiga systems (there is a lot of software around that fails to work with high-end Amigas).
- The next generation Amiga will be able to profit from quickly-ported programs.
Now, you may argue that there are numerous reasons for not doing so. This message was automatically generated from a .README found on one of the Aminet CDs. It may not apply to you at all. In that case, my sincere apologies for disturbing you. However, if you have any source still lying around, please give some thought to making it freely available to the Amiga community.
Don't be shy. Noone writes perfect source. You are not expected to write perfect source either. If you make source available, people will not complain about bad source quality (well, some might: ignore them ;-) ); they will thank you for the opportunity to keep your source up to date. And eventually someone will come and improve that source.
As a suggestion, if you decide to upload source, do it like this:
suppose you have written a program called 'AmigaBla'. It is located on Aminet in misc/misc/AmigaBla.lha. If so, please put its source in that same directory, under the same name, but with a _src extension to the filename. The final archive would then be: misc/misc/AmigaBla_src.lha. This way all source can be found close to its binary, and vice versa.
Once again, my apologies if this message is totally inappropriate for you. But if it applies, and you decide to upload your sources, my heartfelt thanks. You will be doing the Amiga community a great favor.
Regards,
Hans Guijt