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Hmm. An interesting insight into the software business:
it undervalues the IP of already compiled and sold products
enormously. I've heard that "could better be rewritten
from scratch" story numerous times. I can think of at
least one CAD/CAM manufacturer who let a product design
slip through their hands to a small start up and then
had to become that small company's partner to retain
market share. One should value IP even if dusty.
Keep in the drawer next to the Confederate money.
One never knows.
When N&P was released, some of us took the idea of
markup modeling very seriously, possibly in some
cases (me), without really understanding that markup itself
is underpowered when it comes to modeling information.
Documents, yes it models these adequately, but information,
not really. Names and trees and id/idrefs just
aren't enough, but as soon as one gets beyond that,
one has an application language, a document type,
not a document. N&F was spot on for what SGML
designers needed, but too little for the next
generation of information modelling.
So if you do start from scratch, reconsider which
market you want to be in. One thing is fairly
certain; there is no profit in the core technologies
below a certain scale; only in their application.
len
From: W. Hugh Chatfield I.S.P. [mailto:hchatfield@urbanmarket.com]
open text probably has the entire set of source.. although some part of this
may have forked off into Corel as they packaged at least one version of N&FD
with their wordperfect/sgml version.
i offered to take over the source for $1 .. wasn't taken seriously... and
managers from microstar suggested i would be better off starting from
scratch... a task i haven't seriously got around to yet.
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