a little MORE history

[John Oram]

Here's a little background on MORE's tortured acquisition history and 
state of source code. Poor and poor, to summarize.  A discussion got 
started last year via Lawrence Lessig's comments on dead code and 
limiting software copyrights to 10 years, after which the source 
would become public domain.  He uses MORE as an example.

http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/archives/cooper.shtml

Dave Winer's response:  He'd love to see MORE's source released, but 
it's up to Symantec.  They made a bet that the software team would 
stay together.  They lost.

http://scriptingnews.userland.com/moresSource

Brad Petit, the last MORE developer to leave Symantec, followed up. 
Even if the source were available, it doesn't exactly sound portable.

http://scriptingnews.userland.com/bradPettitOnMoresSource

"As for Lawrence Lessig's romanticized notions of MORE ("many who 
share my affection for this clean bit of code"), and for those who 
think the MORE source should be placed in public domain, be 
forewarned. Probably 99% MPW Pascal with a little C and even a bit of 
68k ASM for good measure. All pre-Universal Headers. Pre-PPC. Dense 
code. Lots of Pascal language features taken full advantage of: 
nested procedures, function parameters, etc. But you know that.

It could be fun to bring MORE back from the dead, but it would take a 
lot of digging just to get started."

-John