FAQ

Question: Why give your software away for nothing?
Answer: This is a question asked only by people who have never heard of the Open Source community. Open Source gives you software freedom. Rather than being told what to do by a corporation who can lock your data into a proprietary format, you are free to modify and adapt the software (As long as you have the know how) and you can choose to go to party B for software support even if party A developed the software. Open Source does not mean free. There are two different definitions of free in the English language. Software freedom means free as in speech, not as in beer. There are two opposing camps in the Open Source world, the main ones anyway, the Free Software Foundation headed by Richard Stallman, which is responsible for the GNU project and the opposing camp which uses the BSD license. Please see my Software licenses section for specifics. In the past, I released code under the GNU General Public License but now I release it under a BSD license and not just because it's a shorter text!

Question: Do you write code for Mac OS X?
Answer: No, I have started but not finished a project before. It was intended to be a client for OverChat. I do have a G4 PowerMac but it is a bit slow nowadays and it's presently sitting around doing nothing. I shall look at this support in the future but actually, I prefer to work behind the scenes on the database and OverChat server, rather than the front end work of the clients, which would be better written by other people.

Question: What DNS servers do I need for setting up a dedicated server?
The internal DNS servers run on Bilby [192.168.0.18]
and Greys [192.168.0.24]. We don't mind what priority you use them in, however, you should probably know that Greys is a secondary to Bilby and gets it's data from there and Greys is UPS protected, where as Bilby is not.

Question: Do you write code for Windows?
Answer: I have written a lot of software for Windows in the past, using Borland C++ Builder which I think is a brilliant tool. It uses VCL, the same framework as Delphi. I have not written any Windows software for a while and I presently don't have a Windows machine available to me. Generally, I write code for the Unices and I use GNU autoconf to ensure the code ports between Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD.