[Coco] Owing the community

[Ray Watts]

I think what happens, Dennis, is that a person is one of the few who 
will support the writer/programmer and that is the person who ends up 
getting screwed when a project is abandoned.  The irony can be very bitter.

Griz


Dennis Bathory-Kitsz wrote:

>At 01:44 AM 7/21/05 +0000, farna at att.net wrote:
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>>He had got a lot from the CoCo community, but took it like we owed him more.
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>I have no knowledge of this situation, but I did know Bill.
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>Bill worked incredibly hard and was a marvelous gentleman. He was kind and
>dedicated, and never failed to come through. When we started UnderColor,
>Bill broke one of his cardinal rules -- he wrote for us for free. He, like
>many of us who wrote articles and books, received poor and erratic
>payments, few royalties, and found himself ripped off many times. Bill was
>one of the many who suffered the IJG fate, a story which I will not repeat
>here, but which save the loss of tens of thousands of dollars each.
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>The hobby computer community was fickle and, in those days, rarely came
>through in support of the writers whom they encouraged to create for them.
>Program copying drove several authors out of business -- I found my
>embedded bit-shifted name still in code published in a Magazine Which Shall
>Remain Nameless.
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>For those of us who produced both hardware and software and had employees
>to pay, margins were razor thin. I ran Green Mountain Micro for seven
>years, and took a salary for six months of that time. When folks passed up
>my carefully tested memory chips because they could get cheaper ones
>elsewhere, when the encouragement to create "Learning the 6809" came from
>thousands while only a few hundred eventually purchased it, when our
>projects were copied and released elsewhere virtually unchanged, I was also
>disaffected by it all. I don't think one can claim that authors "got a lot
>from the CoCo community." We stayed for the community as long as we could.
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>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
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