[Symbian-hacks] Re: Yet Another Bluetooth GPS Program

[Christopher Schmidt]

On Mon, Jan 16, 2006 at 08:32:02AM -0500, Christopher Schmidt wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Jan 2006, Christopher Schmidt wrote:
> >I'll probably take a look at the code and see if there's anything I can
> >do to help you out with the code
> 
> Cheers. It's currently only source controlled on my machine, with periodic 
> pushes to my website. If there's enough interest in helping, I can sling 
> the code into svn somewhere

Probably not that important - I can do patchfiles relatively easily.
I'll send another email after this one sometime later today with some
improvements that I think would need to be made -- most importantly, it
looks like there isn't any kind of timeframe when the UI has a chance to
wait, for things like allowing users to set options.

> >and you can feel free to join the Symbian-Hacks mailing list I've sent 
> >this message to and CC'd you on.
> 
> Have done :)
> 
> >Unfortunately, the experience of releasing this has made me rather 
> >despondant on further development on the mobile platform: anything I do 
> >seems to be ignored, or redone, and better, by someone else. The effort 
> >I put forth for releases is too much to just have wasted - GPSDisplay[2] 
> >was only downloaded by a total of 3 people,
> 
> I only wrote my one because the paid-for software I was trying to use 
> (GETrack) wasn't working. Despite several helpful emails over the weekend 
> from the author, I still didn't have anything working on Sunday afternoon. 
> Since he wouldn't give me the code, I couldn't add the debugging I thought 
> might help identify the problem.
> 
> I've already written a simple NMEA parser in perl, so I knew that the NMEA 
> stuff was going to be easy. I found a couple of sample python programs, 
> had a few hours spare, so I started hacking
> 
> Personally, I'd much rather spend a few hours of my own time writing 
> software and have it used widely, rather than used narrowly and get some 
> money. That might well be because I have a nicely paying day job though!

I'm to the point where I'm working too much to have enough free time to
help every person who might stumble into my code. In the past, I've had
time to scour the web for any person using it and complaining about how
it doesn't work, but I'm working for two places right now for pay, so if
I support everyone who uses it -- which is the expectation when you give
things away for free -- I'd not only suck up all my free time, I'd be
losing time I really need to be working. 

A low cost entry fee means that I limit the number of people I'm forced
to support to those who are willing to throw at least a nominal fee into
the ring.

I still haven't come up with a good solution to the fact that everyone
expects there to be really good, free software which is well supported
without any effort to compensate the author of the software for his time
or effort -- which means that I'm expected to not only work for free,
but to provide support for free, in my experience.

-- 
Christopher Schmidt
Mobile Application Developer