Convince Author to Copyleft Freeware

I went ahead and e-mailed them. We'll see what comes of it.

If you need a puzzle programme that you can import puzzle files (.puz files) into you can check out Xword (you need tio disable num lock to fill in the crosswords).

In either event, I felt it couldn't hurt to e-mail that person and ask if they were willing to release the project under a version of the GPL.

His response:

"Hello Thomas,

Thank you for your interest in my Crossword Express program.
I won’t be taking up your suggestion for the following reasons:-
1. I will be 78 next birthday, and I really don’t want the complications which this would bring to my life.
2. I have been developing this program on and off for 28 years, and I am somewhat losing interest in it.
3. There is very little motivation to do anything just for the benefit of the wider community. I have been badly used by the wider community. See http://crauswords.com/whyfreeware.html
4. The only reason I keep it alive at all is to give me something to keep my mind active.

Just the same, thank you for your interest.

Regards
John Stevens"

My response:

"I can understand the suspicion after going through what you did. That said, the free and open source community is not like the rest of the wider community. They would give back by contributing code and keeping your project alive. Aspiring developers can learn from you so they can be better at what they do.

There has been many success stories when the source code of software has been released.

Blender was a proprietary 3D rendering program before the source was released. It is now a popular tool for 3D modeling. Firefox came as a result of Netscape releasing the source code of their Communicator suite.

Even Microsoft has released source code of older versions of programs (albeit for non-commercial purposes): https://computerhistory.org/blog/microsoft-word-for-windows-1-1a-source-code/"

I would not be happy if someone knocks on my front door and wants to convince me to believe in the Bible, the spaghetti monster or whatever, regardless of whether that belief or the intention of the evangelist is good.

Attempts to convince people to act/think in certain way are not different psychologically from marketing, propaganda or any other kind of mental manipulation. It is a subtle form of violence the result of which is resistance and conflict.

I read the software author's web page, where he bemoans software piracy for costing him all his income from the game software. I think that's probably almost entirely untrue. People who use crosswords are not the type that frequent software piracy sites. The reason he probably lost all his income from the program is because people got sick and tired of the shareware scam, where you could use software that wasn't worth the price tag for free for awhile before being threatened with being shut out at the end of 14-days or 30-days or whatever. After you've invested some time in the software and it's holding your data, suddenly you were being held ransom for some exorbitant fee to keep using it. People started using free programs or paying a cheaper price up front for them, and got rid of their shareware. He simply picked a really poor and annoying marketing tactic, and ultimately his sales dried up because other people offered software without the annoying tactic.

That's what I believe happened. Of those thousands of people who downloaded his program from pirate sites, I doubt more than a few ever even used it, and nearly none of them ever would have been paying customers. In fact, many of those downloads were almost certainly from mindless web crawlers.

Mr Stallman seems to have been earning some parts of his living by "preaching".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Stallman

He is the founder of FSF. And FSF has been supporting the coreboot project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coreboot

Some quotes from this Wikipedia's page (both from Japanese' and English'):

> coreboot is a free software project which is supported by Free Software Foundation.

> One of the coreboot variants is Libreboot, a variant of coreboot aiming to be fully free of proprietary blobs.

> It is licensed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). Main contributors include LANL, SiS, AMD, Coresystems and Linux Networx, Inc, as well as motherboard vendors MSI, Gigabyte and Tyan, which offer coreboot alongside their standard BIOS or provide specifications of the hardware interfaces for some of their motherboards. Google partly sponsors the coreboot project.[7] CME Group, a cluster of futures exchanges, began supporting the coreboot project in 2009.[8]

> coreboot has been accepted in seven consecutive years (2007–2014) for the Google Summer of Code.[9][10] Other than the first three models, all Chromebooks run coreboot.[11][12]

> In June 2019, Coreboot began to use the NSA software Ghidra for its reverse engineering efforts on firmware-specific problems following the open source release of the software suite.[14]

Is not that so-called a fork-tongued something? These writing in Wikipedia makes us ignoramuses about computers think some things. In the context of this thread, it would mean that, something like, from the beginning, "Can you recommend some free software which is supported by some notorious (at least in this forum, it seems it is supposed so) companies or some notorious national security agency?".
But surely it could be supposed as an off-topic so I would make another thread to clear this thing, if people find it off-topic. Because if the author of the crossword app had not known the free software movement, maybe he would start to learn about this movement from Wikipedia and he also would read the incomprehensible dualism in some pages. E.g.why NSA and FSF support the same project at the same time?? Then he would not trust the incomprehensible movement nor have interested in such a double-tongued preachment. It seems to be super reasonable. Big laugh. By the way, it seems that Vatican have admitted the validity of the theory of evolution, I did not know that, but off course it leads other problems such as so why do they still parasitize the religion or something? They seem to prefer the theory of evolution than the spaghetti monster.