The future of GeoBuddy

[+TresOkies]

Here's the deal...

 

Life is more complicated than it was a year or so ago when I first started writing the code that became GeoBuddy. It's been fun, but I can't give GeoBuddy and its' user base the attention they deserve. I need to hand it off or kill all future development.

 

I am open to ideas, but I absolutely _will_ _not_ open source the code. I have reasons for this, but I am not interested in having this thread get sidetracked with an open source debate. Don't start it, please.

 

I will entertain offers for cash. There is a fairly enthusiastic user community for GeoBuddy. A number of users have said they would pay for GeoBuddy, so it may be a revenue source for someone who wants to get into shareware. In the event of a cash sale, I will relinquish all source code, rights to use the name GeoBuddy, and the ownership of GeoBuddy.com and the contents of the website.

 

Given no offers of cash, I will hand off the code to the person who seems best prepared to maintain it. If this is how I dispose of GeoBuddy, I reserve rights to use portions of the source in other projects and I retain all rights to the name and ownership of GeoBuddy.com.

 

If you want to discuss this via email, contact me at ericc@pobox.com.

 

-E

 

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N35°32.981 W98°34.631

[+Olar]

Eric I'm sorry to read that you must step down from further work on GeoBuddy. I know nothing about writing code so I cannot volunteer to help out. I can only imagine the amount of time necessary to keep it updated. I hope you are successful in finding someone to adopt/buy it and are able to utilize some of the time saved to continue with Geocaching.

I thank you for sharing GeoBuddy with us.

Good Luck, Olar

 

[+mrcpu]

Firstly let me say that I understand where you're coming from. I have a 10 year old, a 14 month old and a third (AND FINAL!!!) one on the way for Sep/Oct. Just getting out of the house once or twice a month to do some serious GCing is not easy and requires logistics that rival those of most major military forces going into battle.

 

That said, I wish that I was more proficient in programming and had the tools. I've dome my share of C and Pascal in school and started programming in BASIC at the age of 11 (You should have seen what I could do in 3K of RAM!!!), HOWEVER, I'm currently only any good at PERL or hacking up someone elses asp pages.

 

I was kind of hoping that Geobuddy would move from just doing .loc files to .gpx files and that once Jeremy has prepared for it, the download from the pages would come as .gpx with the description as extended XML fields that Geobuddy could turn into RTF or something similar.

 

Oh well, Thanks for all your effort! There is one other option and that is to put Geobuddy aside and revive it at some point in the future (Leaving the website up of course!).

 

Cheers and Thanks,

 

Rob

Mobile Cache Command

[+TresOkies]

quote:

---

Originally posted by mrcpu:

Firstly let me say that I understand where you're coming from. I have a 10 year old, a 14 month old and a third (AND FINAL!!!) one on the way for Sep/Oct. Just getting out of the house once or twice a month to do some serious GCing is not easy and requires logistics that rival those of most major military forces going into battle.

---

 

I totally understand. There's nothing big going on in my life, just a thousand little things. Things like building fence, painting the house, and attending school board meetings (yes, I'm on the school board, how frightening is that ). I have a good start toward the 2.0 version, but I haven't written a line of code on it in two months.

 

quote:

---

I was kind of hoping that Geobuddy would move from just doing .loc files to .gpx files and that once Jeremy has prepared for it, the download from the pages would come as .gpx with the description as extended XML fields that Geobuddy could turn into RTF or something similar.

---

 

The plan for GeoBuddy 2.0 was to handle GPX. I downloaded the specs and started to put in code to deal with the files. The framework for GeoBuddy 2.0 will handle all these different file types.

 

-E

 

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N35°32.981 W98°34.631

[+TresOkies]

quote:

---

Originally posted by mrcpu:

Firstly let me say that I understand where you're coming from. I have a 10 year old, a 14 month old and a third (AND FINAL!!!) one on the way for Sep/Oct. Just getting out of the house once or twice a month to do some serious GCing is not easy and requires logistics that rival those of most major military forces going into battle.

---

 

I totally understand. There's nothing big going on in my life, just a thousand little things. Things like building fence, painting the house, and attending school board meetings (yes, I'm on the school board, how frightening is that ). I have a good start toward the 2.0 version, but I haven't written a line of code on it in two months.

 

quote:

---

I was kind of hoping that Geobuddy would move from just doing .loc files to .gpx files and that once Jeremy has prepared for it, the download from the pages would come as .gpx with the description as extended XML fields that Geobuddy could turn into RTF or something similar.

---

 

The plan for GeoBuddy 2.0 was to handle GPX. I downloaded the specs and started to put in code to deal with the files. The framework for GeoBuddy 2.0 will handle all these different file types.

 

-E

 

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N35°32.981 W98°34.631

[otherdave]

I'm guessing this is all Visual C++ code?

 

I might be interested in doing some work on it. Have you thought about releasing the source to a couple of people, signing NDAs or something?

 

I'd like to work on it, but I'm not sure if I want the WHOLE responsibility (for time reasons, just as you described). This way you could maintain the web-site and all that and have a small developer base working on it. After all, two heads are often better than one.

[+TresOkies]

I think I have something set up here. Once the details are straightened out, I'll post a reply. Thanks to everyone who responded.

 

-E

 

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N35°32.981 W98°34.631