Sad news

[NyxOne]

Hi everyone,

i have a news that might interest a few people around! I hope this is not old news! Forgive me if it's been told before...

Yesterday i sent an email to Martin J. King to get acces to his WorkSheet and here's the answer i got :

"I am sorry but I have stopped providing access to my MathCad worksheets. The support from the DIY community has been very weak and I have had more and more problems with commercial ventures using the worksheets without the necessary license. The restricted page on my site is still available to current license holders until their agreement expires and then the page will be removed completely."

It think it's really a shame that we have to loose this precious software because of some greedy commercial folk... Damn... it was only 25$


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Chuck

[TacoD]

Most people do not want to pay for software, and certainly not those people thinking that DIY is a cheap alternative to commercial stuff.

As an alternative you can consider AJHorn (also available in English).

[tktran]

This is a shame. This is an example that it only takes 1-2 individuals with commercial ties/interests to change the situation for everyone else.

[Paul K.]

Actually....

while there were definitely unethical people illegally using Martin's software for commercial purposes, which has always been a problem to some extent, the primary reason for him to discontinue availability, updating and expansion of his work falls on us, the DIY community, for failing to support him via the very modest annual subscription costs of $25. I sure am glad to have use of his software as a DIYer, and those of us who have subscribed can continue to use what we've downloaded until it no longer works for whatever reason.
Paul

[Dennis H]

Well, just to be a contrarian, I think Martin's being a bit spiteful. He could stop upgrading his worksheets (no more work for him) and still sell them to new people who wanted to use them. He started out giving them away for free so I'm not sure why he's so mad he isn't making the big bucks other than maybe expectations that were too big on his part.

[Mark K]

I'm sorry to hear this on two fronts.

First, it's bad for the diy community as a whole. It is a significant loss.

Second, I personally am disappointed. I had paid Martin for 2007, but not downloaded anything. Just didn't get to it. I was going to do it this year, but hadn't gotten to it. Now, it doesn't look like I'll get the chance. I still have some of his older worksheets, but that's it.

Still best of luck to Martin. I think he didn't/isn't really getting the credit due(whether that's money, the honor of published work, or similar).

[Paul K.]

Well...

It's not so much Martin being spiteful, IMO, but his trying to justify the large amount of work it takes to develop and expand upon what he's already accomplished and made available. He had just finished completing new worksheets that would allow taking into account ceilings, floor, 4 walls, and a corner cabinet placement at an user-defined angle and was about to add that to his available worksheets. But, after considering how much time would be involved, the number of illegal users and, most important, the mininal support from the DIY community, he decided it simply wasn't worth the time. I'm quite convinced Martin certainly never planned to "make big bucks", otherwise he would have never offered the worksheets free at the beginning, but there's nothing wrong about hoping to offset costs, even if those costs are primarily valued in hours of work on a hobby/interest. And don't overlook how much "value" there is to simply receive recognition for one's work, which often was not given Martin. Yes, he could just stop generating and updating his current worksheets and continue to keep them available, but he'd still have to maintain his site and expend money on it, I presume. Martin has always been willing to help people use his work, including making custom additions and modifications, expending lots of time via email to communicate understanding, for free, yet many of those people didn't seem to appreciate his efforts.
Paul

Well, just to be a contrarian, I think Martin's being a bit spiteful. He could stop upgrading his worksheets (no more work for him) and still sell them to new people who wanted to use them. He started out giving them away for free so I'm not sure why he's so mad he isn't making the big bucks other than maybe expectations that were too big on his part.

[Brian Walter]

Well I will have to admit that I am disappointed. After hearing so many of Paul's designs at DIY Iowa I was getting ready to purchase a years license or whatever it was. I started trying to use his free worksheets several years ago, but I found the program wasn't very user friendly. Not that MathCAD is all that hard to use, but some of the variables weren't described very well and quite frankly I was lost. Like dimensions from end of line to the speaker and then from there to the far end. I recall spending the better part of a week to simply figure that one part out. The information was there, but it really wasn't laid out all that well. He needed a users manual. He may have one now, but there wasn't much available at that time.

I think one of the reasons the program wasn't utilized as much as he was hoping is that MathCAD itself is a very expensive program and if all your were going to use it for was designing TL's, it wasn't very practical. I happen to use MathCAD at work on a regular basis, so that isn't an issue for me. It's too bad he wasn't able to write the program in Excel like Jeff B. did with his programs. I realize that Excel isn't nearly as powerful and you might not even be able to do it, but I do think that is one factor for it's low acceptance in the DIY community.

Maybe what he should do is offer the program one last time so everyone that would really like to get it could. I'm sure that would generate a fair amount of additional business and give him a little boost before he shuts everything down.

Brian Walter

[Paul K.]

Hey, Brian...

Martin had and still has a link to a free version of MathCad which is what I use. This MathCad works perfectly fine with all of Martin's worksheets. Its only drawback is it doesn't allow you to save your work in a form for follow-on modeling, only in static form via copy-and-paste. That doesn't bother me but it may others. Now, even though Martin will be shutting down access to his worksheets, those of us who already have them, or whom download them before their subscriptions expire, will be able to use them ad infinitum, or until something causes them to no longer work. I've got his worksheets and MathCad loaded onto both my and my wife's computers and I will soon copy them to a disk for another backup. And, as long as I'm able, I'll be happy to model TLs for other DIYers.
Paul