Hi All,
I'm sure you're all wondering, why is this current change at Yahoo taking so long to fix?
By way of explanation we must first go back in time...
In early 2001 the Dotcom implosion was in full swing. Large companies were going bust right & left. No one was safe.
I'd always been keen on the idea of being able to have a local copy of my groups messages but now the need was considerably more urgent. Being an oldtime mainframe type programmer, I knew what I wanted from a group downloader but had no idea what to write such a thing in. I also didn't have the time so I approached a Russian outsource company and they created the first PG Offline from my specification.
They continued to maintain PGO until they folded in 2003 and in that fallout I did a direct deal with Alexander Nechiporenko (the lead programmer) so that he would continue maintaining PGO in his spare time. That arrangement served us well until 2006 when Alex got a more demanding day job and he had to give up maintaining PGO.
At this point I asked Matti Aladin to continue PGO maintainance on an ad hoc basis and that worked fine until this most recent problem. Matti was not involved in the original PGO development like Alex and although he is a perfectly competant programmer he doesn't have the full skillset Alex had to deal with PGO. Primarily because Alex wrote PGO around the skills that he had.
So, the upshot is that we were stuck when it came to fixing this latest problem.
As you will know from reading the forum posts, I've been asking around my programmer friends to find someone to pitch in. My friend Stewart volunteered but then suffered a pretty bad car accident. Now Stewarts protege Ewan has taken over.
Still, whats the delay here? Shouldn't this be going faster? Well, herein lies the rub... my original business model was to maintain the program using the funds from new sales. Currently PGO has about 500 users, new sales being about two or three a month. Thats OK for keeping up with small changes but not for the big stuff like this last change. The other thing I didn't expect when I started was to have to do so much maintainance. Since I started in 2001 I think there's been about 200 versions. Thats an average of one every fortnight for 8 years. You can't fund that from $75 a month.
The credit crunch has been unkind to quite a few people and I'm no exception. If I'd had the money I'd just have hired in an external contractor to go at this 8 hours a day till it was fixed. Currently I am depending on the good will of people (ie Ewan) to help.
I object to paying a licence every year for software that does what it did last year just fine. I have old versions of programs I've simply never upgraded because they work fine. Like Paint or CAD programs. But PGO isn't like those programs. It can't exist in isolation. When Yahoo says 'Jump!', I have to say 'How high?'. So something has to change. Either we need a lot more registrations per month or I'm going to have to make PGO a licenced product with a yearly licence fee. Nothing crazy. Maybe $10 a year.
What do you think?
Cheers,
Wilson.
