[ydl-gen] (not at all) pathetic

[significant.bit at gmail.com]

As Tomasz says, there's nothing fishy about charging for an open-source product. Especially since terra soft and now fixstars only charge for early and convenient access, also offering YDL via free download.

I purchased YDL 2.0 back in my modem days, got discs, maybe a binder, and some rad stickers. Got version 5 from Kai at a power.org gathering (thanks, btw!), and downloaded their latest release. That's an amazing value for $50 paid ten years ago!

On the other partition, I've had to pay for Mac OS 8.5, 9.0, 10.3, 10.4, 10.5, and the 3.0 software for iPod Touch. All together around $400 spread across ten years, not a steal but still worth the price.

Now that the exhaustive (and exhausting) value comparison is over, I must take issue with some words in that same post:

My main development machine is a PowerBook running Mac OS 10.5. Even though Apple has moved on to its more profitable customers (the ones who call it OS "ex" because they never heard of OS "nine"), I have never felt the need to drive the PowerBook to the dump.

Our main PowerPC test machine is a hot-rod G4 Quicksilver running the latest YDL, Mac OS 10.5, 10.4, 9.2, even a tweaked 8.6. If fate chose any one of these OSes and destroyed the others, the computer would still be very far from useless.

I must agree that regular users of any Mac OS prior to 10.4 are missing out on some great advances. But that was released five years ago and runs great on machines from ten years ago. As more years go by, and we continue to find new uses for computers, the latest PowerPC release of Mac OS will start to feel dated, just as trying to browse the web from Mac OS 9 feels today.

So when that day comes, YDL may very well be the only viable option. I'm rooting for it, as I love Sony's PS3, Apple's systems, and being able to write PowerPC code in a nice modern OS.

Mike Erwin
-- Sent from my Palm Prē
tomasz brymora wrote:

.. pathetic? Trying to collect some clams in exchange for the offerings seems perfectly legit. 

What I'd call pathetic is condemning old, perfectly functioning hardware to the dumps Mr. S J style. YDL is the only viable thing that keeps a lot of machines from being totally useless.

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