From: pdf@eccles.dsbc.icl.co.uk (Paul Fox)
Newsgroups: comp.editors
Subject: Commericialism of CRISP and the sins of life
Date: 26 Jan 93 12:04:31 GMT
Organization: ICL Bracknell, UK


Just thought I -- Paul DAVID Fox, the author of CRISP, would add my
two pennies (sterling) to this. The 'other' Paul Fox (god this
name is common isnt it?) has offered to take on CRISP and improve it.
(I guess that was tongue in cheek ?)

Anyway, as Rohit Mehrotra pointed out, CRISP v3 and above is commercial.
I am not going to debate the good and bad points of this, suffice it
to say that the income from a shareware venture is not enough to buy
a pint of beer. 

However, if _anyone_ wants to do things to CRISP, then I would
very much appreciate hearing from you. I would really hate to see
multitude versions of CRISP appear on the net in the same way there
are half a million versions of Emacs and vi. CRISP, Emacs and vi all
address different design goals. I wont bother to spout the virtues
of any of these, but suffice to say that each are good in various
areas.

If anyone is really that unhappy about CRISP at present, then please
talk to me first (and I'm referring to v2 here). In theory there is
nothing I can do to stop the spread of the shareware version, but
I do take offence that the net believes that CRISP belongs to 'it' when
'it' has provided very little feedback on the matter.

The crisp-list mailing list had a fairly good crowd of people 
contributing ideas, many of which were actually implemented by v2.2.
However by v2.2 this mailing list started warring on the ethics of
creeping-featurism. V3 addresses exactly the needs of the customers
who use it.

If people want to hack CRISP 2.2 and make it go in a divergent direction
then it is just adding yet-another-editor to the world, without any
real justification. Of course private hacking is what the usenet
is all about -- we all hack each others code; but trying to get CRISP
to work on the multitude of terminals/machines is a very tiresome
process. So if anyone wants to try things out, talk to me and we
can discuss what needs to be done. V3.0 has vast areas of rewrites
and improvements of v2. There is little point in re-inventing
the wheel for much of this stuff.

I guess the audience of the Usenet is pretty varied, from newcomers
to computing to those that have been in this business a long time.
(I belong to the latter). Each of us will reinvent the wheels in
different ways.

One last thing, I do actually read comp.editors whenever I can
but due to pressures of work I very rarely have the time
to contribute to whats going on. Previous personal additions to
the Usenet community include a VT220 widget for X11 and an HP48
emulator. In each case hacking was much more fun than supporting and
I have given up trying to support the software on the Usenet. There
is not enough time in the day to do so. Please do not feel I have taken
something away from the net -- I have simply added too much to be
able to support it with my spare time.

Lastly, this is a posting from work where I will not be much longer.
Please address any flames personally to me: fox@crisp.demon.co.uk.
Dont waste net bandwidth on flames, I have a /dev/null waiting for them.
Further useful enlightenments can be directed at comp.editors.

Paul DAVID Fox (no relation to Paul Fox of the vile fame!)
8 Theobalds Way
Frimley 
Surrey 
England GU16 5RF

Newsgroups: comp.editors