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Thanks for the response, Clemens.  I love a good debate.

After reading the response to my letter, I’ve finally discovered the argument that Clemens Vasters is trying to make.  It’s not that sharing is the problem - it’s that people are making money off the work of these duped open-source kids that get nothing in return. 

He’s hidden his point underneath a cloak of hatred for open-source evangelists and companies, calling the companies that profit off open-source the selfish ones.  Unfortunately, this is the result of not understanding the open-source ecology I mentioned before works whatsoever, despite his claims.

In response to “Where do you want to go, Aiden?”:

Dear Clemens,

I’ve never spoken with you in person, and probably never will, but I feel compelled to answer your public letter on behalf of your friend, Aiden.  I found it difficult to extract your argument from your letter, but I’ll chalk it up to not understanding exactly what open-source is, or why people would ever consider sharing the fruit of their time with others.

I have a simplistic view of open-source that might make sense to you:

I’ve finally figured out how to wire up an encoder (ie: a knob) to a keyboard emulator like the I-PAC.  Easy logic - a flip-flop, some AND and NOT gates.  Extra credit: redesign this logic to replace AND and NOT with NAND.

I knew that electrical engineering degree would come in handy at some point!  Here’s the waveform it produces:

I’ve been tossing the idea of building a MAME cabinet around in my head for a while and I’m getting close to decided whether to do it or not this summer.  I’m hoping that with enough planning, it should be a smooth enough project for me to complete during the warm months here in Calgary.

Three interesting places I’ve found for purchasing arcade-quality controls:

• Ultimarc
• Happ Controls
• Oscar Controls

Right now, I’m investigating various control-to-USB converters. 

Happ Controls has the “USB Game Control Interface” for US$185.  This interface can convert two 8-way joysticks, six buttons for each joystick, a three-button trackball, a couple of start select buttons and some coin counters.  It looks like it would do everything I’m looking for, but the price is pretty steep.

The Mozilla Firefox 0.8 release has been so popular that it’s making a number of the main download sites for the browser and extensions, such as  ftp.mozilla.org and mozdev.org, extremely slow.  As the Mozilla community grows, there’s going to be an ever-increasing need to have a solid infrastructure in place to support the increasing amount of traffic. 

I’m impressed with the number of people that have started using this browser - people who I would have never expected to switch have done so.  You never hear the words “this site doesn’t work in Firefox”.