Hypercard: the missing link to the web

Peter Alcibiades palcibiades-first at yahoo.co.uk
Fri Jun 1 02:40:35 CDT 2012

You're not taking account of the Open Source movement.  Were I starting again
at this point, the choice would be Python.  Genuinely free in every way, and
not just as in beer.  There is actually an impulse in many of us, which
neither Friedman, Thatcher nor Marx were able to admit, to contribute to the
common good.   There is a price for free software of the Open Source kind,
that is correct.  The price is considering oneself as a member of a
community, not simply as a consumer.  But for many of us it is a price we
are happy to pay, and at this point we are not participating in a social
experiment.  Its not an experiment, its a well established alternative.

Think about Android....

The problem with Hypercard, and what led to its demise, was fundamentally
that it was not free.  It was the same thing that led to the crazed
ambitions and failure of e-world, the desire to have a closed ecosystem
totally controlled by Apple.  If they had turned Hypercard loose to open
source, it would have become multiplatform at once, and would be thriving
today.  The thing that killed it was a dog in the manger approach to things.


slylabs13 wrote
> TANSTAAFL. There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Even Hypercard was
> not free. We paid for it when we paid for the Mac it was installed on.
> People who want things to always be free need to also consider the term
> "freeloader". Someone somewhere pays for the "free" thing. 
> Even if Apple gave away Hypercard to people who bought a mac without it,
> Apple would still be paying for it. In the case of all those other things,
> the taxpayer is paying for it, or else the company that hired him is
> paying for it, and actually he is likely himself paying for it because he
> is probably getting paid less considering he is getting paid in benefits
> instead of salary. 
> I am always very wary when people offer me something for free. Either they
> are trying to sell me something else later, or they are performing a
> social experiment. 
> Bob

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