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Topic: Winding down LBB (Read 6399 times) |
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Richard Russell
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Posts: 1348
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Re: Winding down LBB
« Reply #30 on: Mar 26th, 2014, 9:44pm » |
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on Mar 26th, 2014, 7:33pm, Rod wrote:| Currently it is positioned as a free alternative to Liberty BASIC, so destroying his market and intellectual property. |
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Please don't suggest that I have violated Carl's Intellectual Property Rights, because that it totally untrue. No IPR exists in respect of the semantics or syntax of a programming language, only in its implementation. Anybody is free to write a clone of a language - consider how many implementations of BBC BASIC by different authors there are!
But it's important to me not only to adhere to the letter of the law but also the spirit. That's why, before releasing LBB, I consulted with Carl (and other senior LB enthusiasts) to make sure what I was proposing would be acceptable. It was as a direct result of that consultation that I (1) changed the name of my implementation from Liberty BASIC Booster to LB Booster and (2) agreed to include in the LBB documentation the comment "LB Booster is Freeware; you are encouraged to purchase the full version of Liberty Basic on which to develop, test and debug your programs prior to 'boosting' them".
Carl has subsequently stated publicly that: "LBB is a legitimate artifact. Feel free to use it if it suits your needs". If he was in any way unhappy he could have contacted me directly, but he has not done so. He could also have contacted me if he was interested in some kind of cooperation, but again he hasn't.
If Carl is finding that his market is declining then there are many possible reasons other than the existence of LBB. For example his failure to fix the large number of bugs in LB4, despite them having long been known and documented; his failure to address the security vulnerabilities in TKN files, which were drawn to his attention years ago; and then of course there is (or more to the point isn't!) LB5....
Richard.
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Jack Kelly
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Posts: 106
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Re: Winding down LBB
« Reply #31 on: Jan 20th, 2015, 10:32am » |
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Richard,
I'm happy to be a new member of the LBB forum. Who could refuse your kind invitation? And most importantly, I have decided that LBB will be my BASIC of choice going forward. I will develop and maintain my programs entirely in LBB. Your work has added brilliance to a somewhat ordinary product. But Just Basic found an important niche among amateur programmers like myself. Years ago I was very happy with GW Basic and the first versions of MS Visual Basic, but these are now history for many reasons. JB was the best that we were left with, and I do like working with it. I don’t need complicated GUI development screens, network security, or enterprise features. Text based coding is the essence of BASIC programming and JB did the job. LBB does it better.
I have an idea for promoting LBB. Have you ever heard of Khan Academy? It's a sophisticated Web site tied to a hugeYouTube channel with thousands of short lectures on primarily math and science. The founder, Sal Khan, is a brilliant entrepreneur and educator. He has received millions of dollars of funding from the Gates Foundation, Google, and many others. But most importantly, Sal, like us, is a self-professed “lover of code.” KA has a Computer Science section that has an on-line Java interpreter for beginners. They were recently a sponsor of the international “Hour of Code” where young people were encouraged to try their hand at programming. Sal has created lectures on Python, and has enlisted people to lecture on HTML and CSS . But I think he should be teaching BASIC. Perhaps you and Sal might have something to talk about, by way of using LBB and promoting it at the same time. His staff probably screens his e-mail, but maybe they would pass on one from you. It’s worth a try, don't you think?
salman@khanacademy.org
I suppose I'm another one of your old school users, but at least I'm not using GoSub anymore. I feel like a part of computer history. Dennis Ritchie was a year ahead of me in high school in New Jersey, before he went on to Harvard. He worked at Bell Labs where he developed the C language and much of Unix. Sadly, he chose to end his life a couple of years ago. Sir Michael Bloomberg was in my class at Johns Hopkins. He knew everyone by first name, and was class president for several years.
In 1964 I visited Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, just when John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz released the first version of BASIC. This created much excitement on the campus, and was a source of pride for the entire community. Kemeny went on to become the president of Dartmouth for many years.
In the Air Force during the late 60s I was a maintenance technician on the Hound Dog missile inertial guidance system. The heart of the system was the stable platform with its gyros and accelerometers, but the brain of the system was the digital computer. I can only describe it as a PC made from transistors and discreet components. Its only memory was a small hard disk. I had no idea how it worked, but I could program it with machine language code. That was the start of my interest in computers.
During the 70s I worked as a maintenance technician for Burroughs, during the age of large “time sharing” mainframe computers. The B5500 ran an operating system called MCP (Master Control Program). It was a thing of beauty -- simple, elegant, innovative, and way ahead of its time -- created by one individual, I believe. Unfortunately the company could not compete well against IBM, and they never had much of a market share. I worked on small second generation computers that ran specialized back office banking operations. Today’s PCs could run circles around them.
Lately I've been working on a tutorial for BASIC programming. I have eight grandchildren approaching their teens, and I'm hopeful that at least one of them will become a lover of code, too.
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