[arachne] Lack of interest of the DOS community in Arachne (was Re: Slow scrolling of large screens)

Arachne at FreeLists---The Arachne Fan Club!

> No, I'm being realistic, not sarcastic. There seems to be almost
> no interest in the open source community for working on Arachne.
> There are a handful of people working on Arachne at most. Hardly
> anyone feels a compelling interest in a DOS browser. Sure, lots
> of people could work on it, but hardly anyone does.

> Where's the interest? No one is rushing to work on Arachne at all.
> One would think there would interest in the DOS community as what
> good is an OS these days without a first class browser? I don't
> understand why there is so little interest in Arachne, but there
> isn't.

I guess that would require people to use DOS as their main OS, which is
currently not the case, I suspect. I have noticed that most DOS
developers seem to program *for* DOS, but not *in* DOS; they prefer to
develop their DOS software in Windows or Linux instead, so it is safe to
assume that they also use Windows or Linux for surfing the 'net. Also, I
bet that there are many people who are interested in *using* a DOS
browser, but who simply do not know how to program.

If we could answer the reverse question, "Why are people interested in
writing a web browser for other OSes?", then we would probably have the
answer to this one, too.

> Michael Polak, the original author of Arachne, came to believe
> that his original conception for Arachne was deeply flawed and
> that Arachne needed to be rewritten from the ground up. He had
> many ideas for improvement and he was doing preliminary work on
> what he called "Arachne 2.00" when the press of having to earn
> a living directed his attention elsewhere. If there had been
> any hope of making a buck with Arachne he might have continued.

He was probably right, Arachne *is* flawed. The basic problem with
Arachne is that it has been designed for "poor people with an Internet
account", a target group which has never existed, and that it requires
too much system resources for an old machine and cannot use enough on a
modern one.

> Linus Torvalds has been paid a salary by Paul Allen for years. Many
> open source programmers are employed by IBM. Sun, and other companies
> large and small that have a business interest in maintaining
> alternatives to Microsoft. Many do work without compensation and
> for various reasons, but to say that "nobody is a millionaire or
> has been hired by one" is just not accurate.

Aha. Well, some time ago, I read an article on ZDnet about Open Source
software that stated that the Open Source concept works because the
programmers do not have to make a living by selling their software,
allowing them to work on "unprofitable" tasks. The author also wondered
why aside from Linux, most Open Source projects move ahead only at
crawling speed. I guess that is because for most of these developers,
time is the limiting factor, not money; only professional programmers
can afford to work on their project all the time.

But I do not think that this is a problem with Arachne; I do not think
that Glenn would work harder if someone would pay him for working on
Arachne unless he would make it a full-time job.

Regards,

Udo

-- The DR-DOS/OpenDOS Enhancement Project - http://www.drdosprojects.de

-- This mail was written by a user of The Arachne Browser - http://arachne.cz/
                  Arachne at FreeLists                  
-- Arachne, The Premier GPL Web Browser/Suite for DOS --

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