Hello Art,
Oh-my-gosh yes, in 2004 I commented that I had purchased Visual Basic.NET at the local CompUSA store, and that I was planning to learn Visual Basic and develop a project from scratch. My original prediction was that I would complete something by August 2004!
Quite a bit has changed since that time:
1. My "day job" projects engulfed me, and I fell more than a year behind in my effort!
2. Despite the delays, I have in fact learned quite a bit about Visual Basic.NET. Just going through the tutorials in the training books, and writing various functional programs, is a blast!
3. I've had a lot of fun, and I've gained a lot more appreciation for what all commercial developers (like Robert Medeksza) go through to produce a debugged commercial product.
4. I have in fact produced something that I think is quite interesting. It's different than I originally imagined, and I've decided that the first person to tell and show it to is Robert Medeksza, since he's the person who encouraged me to go ahead and learn VB.NET in the first place.
In the meantime, I do try to watch the forum whenever I can, even if I don't have the time to post much.
This particular topic and thread caught my eye because the issue of copyrights, patents, intellectual property, etc., has been a recent issue with one of my employers, and because I think it's very relevant to Zabaware and its community of contributors.
When you work hard and create something, you get a strong impulse to show it to everybody in the world. At the same time, you can get a conflicting feeling, worrying that unknown entities could somehow usurp your hard work, and take away your pride of authorship.
I recently read a biography of Walt Disney that told of his early days producing Oswald Rabbit cartoons. The distributor owned the copyright and "fired" Disney's production company by surprise, signing up a cheaper supplier. Disney was shocked by the event, but survived by quickly developing Mickey Mouse. Ever since, the Disney Company has been relentless in guarding the ownership of its characters and properties. It was evidently a lesson that got branded deeply into the culture of the company: the prudent management of intellectual property does matter.
(Of course, the opposite interpretation is that if Disney hadn't been unfairly fired from Oswald Rabbit, he might not have ever created Mickey Mouse!)
I continue to believe that the best balance here on the forum is that code-donors should retain the right to modify and re-publish their own original work, but by posting their work here, they should be granting a free license in perpetuity to Zabaware and other Ultra Hal users...but only for use with Ultra Hal. Zabaware should put a "blanket" copyright onto everything on the forum and everything in its products, recognizing that donors of original material retain their own individual rights to modification and re-publication.
In that way, we accomplish the following things:
1. Users who donate original code don't need to be worried that they will somehow, someday get prohibited from using original materials that they created.
2. Zabaware and its customers get the benefit of the excellent creativity of its community of code donors.
3. Zabaware and its customers get at least nominal protection against the "Brand X Chatterbot Company" doing a lazy knockoff of Ultra Hal using actual exact Ultra Hal code.
I have been a fan of Ultra Hal since version 2.0. I have seen many chatterbots come and go on the web, but Ultra Hal is still the best (and least expensive!) turn-key solution. That says something very positive about both Zabaware and its community of contributors.
Respectfully,
Don Ferguson
