Sydney S. Weinstein, CDP, CCP is a consultant, columnist, lecturer, author, professor, and President of Myxa Corporation, an Open Systems Technology company specializing in helping companies move to and work with Open Systems. He can be contacted care of Myxa Corporation, 3837 Byron Road, Huntingdon Valley, PA 19006-2320, or via electronic mail using the Internet/USENET mailbox syd@Myxa.com (dsinc!syd for those who still cannot do Internet addressing).
I've been writing this column since 1988 for the C Users Journal (pardon the old name, but us old timers remember how CUJ grew out of the C Users Group). David Fiedler wrote it before me for four years. In the twelve years of its existence this column has covered a great deal of software, all contributed by its authors for free distribution via something called USENET.
Well, I am the bearer of bad news. USENET as a medium of source distribution seems to have seen its time and gone. I looked at my archives of postings over the past few months to report on and the cupboard was bare. USENET Network News itself isn't gone, as the 500 megabytes a day of news traffic indicates. But, as that number indicates, USENET in its old traditions has come and gone, and with it, using USENET as the medium for distribution of sources.
Back in 1984 when this column started, USENET sources were just about the only medium for distribution of utilities to assist the UNIX programmer and systems administrator. Back then, a programmer could get an entire newsfeed (all of the news groups being distributed) using a 2400 bps modem in just an hour or two of connect time per day. The news reader of that era, rn, had a compiled in limit of 400 newsgroups, and none of us thought that we would ever have to change that, as we were at about 250 groups and the creation of groups was running at about one per month. There was no alt hierarchy, nor did we have regional ones like we have today.
Back in 1984, USENET news was exchanged using UUCP and modems. Each news site called a few other news sites and forwarded on the articles. Most of us made several local calls and one or two long distance ones. We depended on each other for news feeds and it was a cooperative network.
Things change, and while we could be nostalgic for the old days, I for one really won't miss them. The Internet is here, and it has made much more possible than we have lost. (Okay, so the Internet existed in 1984 as well, but it was not as much a public network then as a private research network. Now the Internet is widely available to almost everyone.)
Source distribution has changed and the systems that depend on C and C++ have changed. Today we have the Internet, CompuServe and its ilk, and CD-ROMs just to name a few. And source distribution has moved from USENET to these mediums for various reasons, some of which are good and some are not.
The Internet
Since the Internet became widely available, FTP archives have become the method of choice for software distribution. The advantages include
Disadvantages include:
- Author Control
Since the authors of the software control the FTP archive, they dictate what gets stored and released. They do not have to meet the packaging requirements of USENET, nor go through the time and effort to deal with the moderator of the source group to get their submission posted.
- Faster Response
The lead time for getting a posting through a source group used to run in the months. You would submit the posting, it would then get checked out, repackaged, and put in the queue. To avoid overflowing the ability of the USENET system to handle traffic flow, postings were released several parts per day. This also contributed to the backlog. With an FTP site, as soon as a release is ready, it is copied to the FTP archive and is immediately available for everyone to access. In addition, patches can be placed on the FTP archive as quickly as they are written, and do not have to wait for the posting delay by the moderator. This rapid response can cut down on the support traffic the authors need to handle requests for solutions to bugs already fixed.
- Access
Access is a double edged sword. You need to be on the Internet to have access, but that is becoming easier and easier, so that problem is going away. But the more people on the Internet, and the more they want your contribution, the more they tie up the communications bandwidth at your FTP site. A popular package can easily saturate a communications link. The solution to this problem is to line up mirror sites that copy the files to their site and spread the load across many sites. But it takes time and effort to line up mirror sites and to make sure they stay up-to-date.
- Lack of a Moderator
While the USENET source group moderators were a delaying factor, they also served a useful purpose. They attempted to compile each program, making sure that the posting was complete and compilable. In addition, moderators all enforced some minimum standards. Usually this meant manual pages and a makefile. Without the moderator enforcing standards the authors can put out anything they want and the rest of us have to deal with the lack of uniformity, and often the lack of documentation. However, we also have the last word, we can refuse to download or use that software package.CompuServe, et al.
CompuServe is one of the better known fee-for-service systems. On these systems you pay a fee for monthly access and connect time and they provide access to their resources. Some popular packages have moved to these services because the services can pay a royalty fee back to the provider when their package is downloaded. This provides remuneration back to the author, which USENET could not. There is nothing wrong with this, other than it reduces the amount of freely distributable sources. As a software author myself, I see nothing wrong with being paid for what I do. As a user of freely distributable sources I mourn the loss of some of the packages. However, the fees charged by these on-line services for the packages are usually very minor and not too much of an impediment to their use.
CD-ROMs
CD-ROMs started as a compendium of freely redistributable sources. The compilers of CD-ROMs did not have to pay a royalty for copying these sources and they could then charge a minimal fee for the production and distribution of their CD-ROM, and of course some for profit, and still have a viable product.This situation has led to a thriving industry in providing sources via CD-ROM. Several vendors now publish CDs on a regular basis and solicit contributions directly from authors. In addition, these CD-ROM publishers have not turned their back on the Internet. Several of them have placed systems on the Internet and make available via that medium the entire contents of their source CDs. Making the source available really doesn't hurt their sales very much as it is much easier to read a CD (especially at their low CD prices) than to take the time to download hundreds of megabytes of sources over the network.
What do the Moderators think?
I polled the moderators about the lack of postings in their source groups and basically got the same refrain from all of them:We have more work to do now than we used to (an effect of corporate downsizing, I suppose) and the sources just aren't coming in as much as they used to.
The lack of time to do a good job leads to longer delays to get sources posted. This also pushes the sources to other readily available distribution channels. It's like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So, what's next? Well, I'll still write one more column, listing where to get sources that have been posted and discussed in the past, and how to find sources that are available on the Internet, and I'll wrap up whatever postings do show up.
But it's time for this columnist to move on, and time for someone else to step forward and start a new column, reviewing sources that are available on CD-ROMs and via the Internet to solve the particular problems faced by C and C++ programmers. And, perhaps its time I dropped the dsinc!syd from my authors information; will the last person who can't do Internet addressing but can do the old USENET addressing, please turn out the lights as they leave, thanks.
We at CUJ are especially sorry to see Syd go, and not just because we're losing a source of valuable copy. Syd's column performed a rare service for C and C++ programmers. If you're like most developers, one of your biggest challenges is simply not reinventing the wheel. And yet, many programmers do just that, because they don't know where to find the source code "out there" they could use to supplement their own projects. Syd told us where to find that code, what was new, and what it did, and in so doing furthered the cause of freely distributable software (a cause, by the way, that inspired the founding of this magazine).
That doesn't mean freely distributable software is dead, of course. There's tons of it out there, and tons more being written every day. We want to continue to help you find the fraction of it that's useful to you, by listing ftp sites and CD-ROM collections of interest. You can help us by answering a few questions and sending in your own suggestions for what you'd like to see in this column. For example, what sites and newsgroups would you dig through if you only had the time? What particular kinds of source code have you had a difficult time finding? What features make for a really good CD-ROM source archive? What "features" really bug you?
Answering questions like this will help us figure out how to replace Sydney Weinstein. (No Syd, it's not the end of the world, but you will be missed.) Send suggestions via e-mail to cujed@rdpub.com, or send us a letter at C/C++ Users Journal, 1601 W. 23rd St., Lawrence, KS 66046.
-mb