★ LITTÉRATURE ★ ENGLISH ★ THE FREE SOFTWARE HANDBOOK ★ |
| The Free Software Handbook (Amstrad Action) | Littérature English |
If you've got CP/M, you've got access not only to some first rate applications software but also to a vast array of public domain programs. The great thing about public domain is, if you like a program and find it useful you can make copies and give them to friends, legally. Because of this, a public domain - or "p-d" -program can travel large distances. The problem then is documentation - how do you know how it's supposed to work? Word of mouth is never very satisfactory, and sooner or later you're going to come across something you forgot to ask about. Of course, the original authors of p-d programs have no incentive to document them. Often the authors are unknown, or the programs considerably modified by later users. The Texas firm of PeopleTalk set out to fill the documentation gap, and this book is the result. Of course, there are far too many p-d programs for one book to cover more than a fraction of them. The authors have, therefore, picked their 70 favourite programs to document. For each one you get a description of the program, together with details of operation. The writing style is chatty, informal and very friendly. The assumption throughout is that hackers write p-d programs but ordinary people use them. Where the book has to get technical for a modem program and a selection of hackers'tools - the explanations are kept clear and reasonably simple. AMSTRAD COMPATIBILITY Unfortunately, Amstrad owners with an interest in p-d have more than documentation to worry about. The little matter of the 3" disk format has prevented the normal flow of p-d from other machines at an individual level. User groups have been the main force behind p-d on the Amstrad machines, so if you're not a member of one you probably won't have many of the programs the book covers. Davis Rubin Associates, who distribute the book in this country, also offer the programs on 3" disks. For most users, the book will only be of any use with the disks so in a sense this is more a software review. Bear in mind, however, that these programs are public domain. If you can cadge copies off a friend, do so - that's what the programs'authors intended. In any case, you'll probably find the book helpful. The programs fall into various serious categories - applications, file management, communications etc. - but the first thing to mention is the games section. The games present quite a few difficulties, and not just because this is the Serious Software section. Most of them, and that means 15 programs out of the total 70 considered, are in BASIC. The problem is, this means MB ASIC or something compatible - Locomotive BASIC just won't do. Mallard BASIC, as supplied with the 8256 and 8512, works just fine so PCW owners can have a whale of a time. If you own a CPC on the other hand, you probably don't have a suitable BASIC. That still leaves chess, othello and an enormous adventure all in .COM form. APPLICATIONS Serious programs form the majority, and some of them are very useful indeed. If you run a shop, the inventory program FOOD could be just what you're looking for to keep track of your stock levels. As for any writers out there, they might like to try out SPELL-11. It's a spelling checker complete with start-up dictionary, and compares very favourably with commercial alternatives. Use this in conjunction with the p-d word count WCOUNT and you could save yourself a lot of effort, not to mention a fair bit of money. On the disk management side there are utilities to squeeze and unsqueeze files, erase and unerase, rename, transfer and index them. There's also a whole package of library utilities and a marvellous master catalogue program, either of which would help organise the most chaotic collection of disks. For hackers there are debugging and disk editing tools, a comms program and an input/output trap. Although these programs are not particularly new, and are therefore designed to run on earlier versions of CP/M, most of them will still run under CP/M Plus. The handful that don't are unfortunately of no use to PCW users, while 6128 owners will need to dig out their CP/M 2.2 discs. And the classic Star Trek game STRTRK needs an archaic dialect of BASIC which Mallard can't stand in for. Otherwise, there are a lot of rough edges which quality commercial software would have had removed but at the price, that's hardly something to complain about. Whether this package is your kind of thing depends on what you're after. It does make CP/M interesting and fun, and that takes some doing. For PCW owners it offers entertainment and a good set of utilities at a very reasonable price. As for CPC users, there are much slicker entertainments packages available to them elsewhere - but it still offers great value for CP/M users, on the serious side of things. In addition it offers a rare taste of the pioneering spirit that computing used to be all about - or a touch of nostalgia, if you were there. THE PUBLIC DOMAIN When a programmer writes a piece of software, he has an automatic copyright over it. Nobody else can make a copy of the program without getting his permission - which usually means parting with cash. Copyright doesn't normally lapse until 50 years after the author's death. Computers being fairly rare in 1936, you might suppose that all worthwhile computer programs were still under copyright. In fact, this is not the case. Many benevolent programmers give up their rights to programs they've written, so that anyone can use and copy them quite freely. Surrendering your copyright over a program in this way is called "putting it in the public domain". There are now large numbers of public domain programs in circulation, many of them really quite old in microcomputing terms. Nobody can sell the actual programs, though commercial distributors will charge for copying, documentation and the disks themselves. AA
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