Good morning,
(It's not 2 p.m., it's definitely morning.)
I'm splitting this out because I didn't want to detract from the original thread, but I feel like it's important to address this from @Dog Cow.
I wanted to briefly discuss the relationship between vtools and the greater 68kMLA. wthww notified me this would come up, I even floated the idea to him, but this post is going to serve to address this comment:
and lay down the foundation for some discussion about what vtools is or should be.
So, to address the original comment: This isn't a bad idea, but, some things would need to be organized and perhaps the scope of vtools changed, which might reduce people's interest in it. As I mentioned, I floated this idea to wthww a couple times, and when I first laid out what the priorities for vtools would be, one of the line items would be to send money to wthww, to help cover the costs associated with hosting the 68kMLA.
The biggest problem is really what's on vtools, and the management process for that. To put it briefly: most of the interest in vtools appears to come from being a way to get software onto vintage Macs easily. That's.... not entirely on purpose, but it's something that either shouldn't have the 68kMLA name on it, or at the very least should be operated totally separately, and, for better or worse, there probably should be a process for removing things at the request of copyright holders.
The next easiest option would be to pivot it into primarily being a groupware server, with a software share that contains primarily "free and clear" things, such as older OS versions Apple officially licensed for free, freeware/shareware mirrors, updates/patches, trialware, and perhaps things like magazine CD-ROMs. Those aren't bad things, but it's thoroughly less appealing than being a one-stop shop for hypercard, oregon trail, simcity, office, and photoshop.
That aside, nominally the vtools money is spoken for in terms of upgrading the machine itself and, that's largely still In Progress. It's stalled, but the money is accumulating and waiting for me to make a move on a disk shelf and disks. I'm basically holding on right now until I've got the money to do a couple of the initial upgrades at once.
(It's not 2 p.m., it's definitely morning.)
I'm splitting this out because I didn't want to detract from the original thread, but I feel like it's important to address this from @Dog Cow.
I wanted to briefly discuss the relationship between vtools and the greater 68kMLA. wthww notified me this would come up, I even floated the idea to him, but this post is going to serve to address this comment:
and lay down the foundation for some discussion about what vtools is or should be.
So, to address the original comment: This isn't a bad idea, but, some things would need to be organized and perhaps the scope of vtools changed, which might reduce people's interest in it. As I mentioned, I floated this idea to wthww a couple times, and when I first laid out what the priorities for vtools would be, one of the line items would be to send money to wthww, to help cover the costs associated with hosting the 68kMLA.
The biggest problem is really what's on vtools, and the management process for that. To put it briefly: most of the interest in vtools appears to come from being a way to get software onto vintage Macs easily. That's.... not entirely on purpose, but it's something that either shouldn't have the 68kMLA name on it, or at the very least should be operated totally separately, and, for better or worse, there probably should be a process for removing things at the request of copyright holders.
The next easiest option would be to pivot it into primarily being a groupware server, with a software share that contains primarily "free and clear" things, such as older OS versions Apple officially licensed for free, freeware/shareware mirrors, updates/patches, trialware, and perhaps things like magazine CD-ROMs. Those aren't bad things, but it's thoroughly less appealing than being a one-stop shop for hypercard, oregon trail, simcity, office, and photoshop.
That aside, nominally the vtools money is spoken for in terms of upgrading the machine itself and, that's largely still In Progress. It's stalled, but the money is accumulating and waiting for me to make a move on a disk shelf and disks. I'm basically holding on right now until I've got the money to do a couple of the initial upgrades at once.
