Petition to Microsoft

[Zack]

Because they don't give a rats arse about QB. The outcome of this will be either Yes (unlikely) or No.

[Plasma]

Signed. Why can't I view the list? It only says:

Name Comments Which of the BASIC line of products do you use?


11 Total Signatures



View Signatures : 11

Also Just a thought what if MS decides to start an enormous lawsuit
against all those on the list, for illegal use of copyrighted products?

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[Silent-Death]

About that thing you said about trying to contact everyone we can to sign the pention... I'm subscibed to a mag. called PC Gamer. Want me to wright a letter asking people for support?

[barok]

yes! all the merrier!

[LooseCaboose]

You guys know anyone on slashdot?

It is free to sign up to Slashdot and anyone can submit news or ask Slashdot. I have posted on a few of the articles there.

Let's make this. If Microsoft gives a @£^$ about some 1,000s of users this will be a great success.

I think its a big change. For me, I will be using something legal. That makes a difference. Microsoft is showing care. That makes a difference. Bring the community as one. Thats a difference

I did say it was my personal opinion, but it would be nice to be able to use the compilers legally. However all I see happening if Microsoft agree to this, is that the compilers license will be changed to freeware and no more. I dont think Microsoft are going to start supporting the products, release the source code (Microsoft are still making money of Basic products) or anything major like that. For most of us the situation will be the same (IMHO).

Edit: I did sign the petition, because I am a supporter of the QB community.

[aetherfox]

hmmm

enormous lawsuit?

it scares me...

my info is up there...

ah shit.

[Blitz]

Let's say they do release the source, what are you going to do with it? Expand on it? Port it to pmode? Just look at the source for qbasic 1.1, by the time you've figured out how it works you could have written your own from scratch. Nah, the source is useless. And this freeware thing, who cares if you download an illegal copy? M$ certainly don't.

[R@dioman]

Blitz has a point. Are there any coders out there skillfull enough to understand the complexity of QB's source code and expand from that? They would have to restructurize the whole thing from near scratch. I'm sure it's doable but with technology expanding very rapidly, QB, I'm afraid, is doomed for extinction. Maybe a few hobbyist will still be toying with it in 20 years using their ancient pc. Who knows, maybe I'm just a pessimist.

[Zack]

Well, I hope none of you were hoping to be able to recompile it, because that's generally impossible.
Anyway, no, perhaps not, but we could take asm PROC for the MID$() function, without making our own...probably wouldn't understand stuff like the memory allocation and tokenizing they do, but like I said, we could rip some functions.

[Blitz]

For what purpose? It's not exactly the best code you'll ever see, not even close. And if the runtime lib is all you want then download the qbasic 1.1 source, the runtime lib is pretty much the same in all of them.