Brad Pettit on MORE's source

Being the last MORE dev who left Symantec. I thought I'd offer two cents, hindsight being what it is.

You're right that MORE was a bad investment [for Symantec], but what killed MORE is that Symantec bought and thought it was developing a presentation program -- not a PIM -- while the MORE fervor is for MORE the outliner, not MORE the presentation program and tree chart generator.

There were three major presentation programs back then: MORE, Persuasion (a tough competitior that was killed before MORE), and PowerPoint. Only PowerPoint remains -- not because Microsoft killed them by including it in Office -- but because the market lost interest in paying for presentation programs that specialized in static images and very limited animations when Director hit the street.

By the time Doug left (being the last of the real LVT devs) after shipping MORE 3 (The David Whitney era), Symantec had given up. There was 3.1 that fixed a few bugs, and a feature I added for a special build supposedly used by one of the Hubble developers (ORA, for "their" bug fix). When I left Symantec for Apple, while on the Mac ACT! team, I archived the MORE source code and dev environment to a drive and gave it to my manager in case it was ever needed. "Just run this script."

A few years ago, Symantec asked me where they could find the code (how f-ing irresponsible is that?). I never could quite understand because the source for every release, on multiple floppies, was to have been in some vault somewhere. Go figure. Anyway, they were going to show the source to an outside party, but I don't know why. They tracked it down when I told them about the drive.

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.

--bp

p.s. As for copyright, am I wrong on this? Every new version of software with added features would (like other published material) be eligible for a new copyright, and unless the source code is released, it remains a trade secret like the Coke recipe.