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Expire Demo
Dear Folks,
Unfortunately, we can't put a time-limited-only version of Executor
out on the archives. Our reasoning will make sense to some of you,
but will seem awfully strange to others, but it's true.
The problem is that ARDI's purpose is to do Mac compatibility in
general, including both emulators for machines with their own
operating systems (NeXTs, Suns, IBM-PCs and clones) and ROMs for Mac
clones. If you're familiar with the Mac clone market and the Mac
emulator market, you're aware that the existing "clones" and
"emulators" require Mac ROMs to work. There's the rub; if we release
a time-limited-only version of Executor, then people could make
emulators that require our time-limited-only version of Executor
instead of Mac ROMs.
This may not seem very probable to you, but we're talking about a
potentially *LARGE* market. The fact that people already have
emulators that require ROMs shows that people are willing to
disassemble the ROMs in order to know enough about them to build
emulators that require the ROMs. Since Mac ROMs are expensive, these
emulators aren't particularly widespread.
It is not clear that it is possible to give away software that in
effect has our entire reverse engineered ROMs in it and legally
prevent people from writing emulators that read our demo into memory
and then jump in and out of it as necessary. Again, this may sound
like paranoia, but due to certain unique aspects of the Mac cloning
game, it is in fact a serious consideration.
That's why the demo version that's out there can only run a few
programs; significant portions of ROMlib (our equivalent to the Mac
ROMs) have been *removed* (not just hidden) in the demo version.
However, all is not lost. The problem that people are concerned
about should be ameliorated by a few things:
NeXT is about to get a site license that will allow all NeXT
*owned* machines to run Executor 1.3. This will give them
greater familiarity with our product and hopefully some of
them will relay messages about what works and what doesn't.
We've hired three non-programmers to handle tech. support.
In the past we've had programmers doing tech. support and
the unfortunate reality is that they'd get pulled into
into programming at the expense of keeping logs of what
works and what doesn't work.
Executor 1.3 will be able to run more programs. As more
things run, the more copies we sell and the more feedback
we get and the more likely it is that one of you will know
the answer to the question of does xxx run. It also means
that it's more likely that someone you know, or who is in
your users' group will have a copy of Executor.
We're selling through dealers now; some of them are testing
programs and letting us know the results.
ISV's are increasingly willing to send us software for us to
test so we can advertise that it runs, or make it run in the
next version if it doesn't.
Happy Holidays.
--Cliff