[Coco] Owing the community

[Roger Taylor]

At 11:21 AM 7/21/2005, you wrote:

>>To those who threw their hands up in disgust and left the hobby market, I
>>hold no ill will because I did it myself -- after having lost my life
>>savings, my business, and my wife.
>>
>>Dennis


I spent an unGodly amount of time, years, since the 80's pouring most (not 
all) of my free time into programming.  The time was not lost, though, 
because I use those skills today to produce things.

When I married in 1997, I begged her to understand what I do and that I 
would need *some* time to get my projects done.  Ofcourse, I ended up 
abandoning many of my projects to run my family, which is something I do 
not regret.  Family comes first.  However, it was during those times I was 
working on projects that she felt abandoned, so in time it got old.  And 
so, one of my biggest CoCo programs gained popularity because I acted on 
feedback even during hard times.

In a nutshell, Projector-3 endured some girlfriends and one wife.  When it 
was all over, after the years of effort, it probably made $700 total.  So, 
were my efforts aimed totally at the potential income the software would 
make?  Not at all.  I gained a lot of skills when writing P-3 and I use 
them today to author other things that have a cost.  What's sad is that 
there have been MANY CoCo programmers before me that made thousands of 
dollars on some of the crappiest software I've ever seen.  Maybe I should 
have been in the Rainbow or something. :)

Anyway, my take on authors who give up on a project after having received a 
considerable amount of donations and support from fans, is that they should 
come forward in some way and let us know what happened.  They should also 
hand over all of the source code and authoring tools to some other force 
who has interest in the project.  In fact, maybe the person who made the 
largest donation or payment(s) should be the new owner.


-- 
Roger Taylor