Drifting a bit off-topic with this of course Norman - I'm on the committee of a few (non-QL) organisations. We recently had an issue with punctuality of membership renewals in one of them. A deadline had been set, but even fellow committee members were a bit laid back about it and it was causing a lot of time and effort sending out reminders etc etc. So what I did (as admin) was those who hadn't paid by the deadline got taken off our Whatsapp chat group punctually, now that they were technically non-members. For some reason, that immediately got results when it affected them!NormanDunbar wrote:When I was at work and needed to shut down a system, we used to ask if it was still used. We never got replies, so couldn't shut it down willy-nilly.
After a few occasions of net getting anywhere, we simply sent an email around everyone saying "Application XXXX is obviously, no longer used, and so, will be shut down on <insert date> and removed from the system.". Amazingly, we used to get replies saying"hang on, I use that every week, you can't shut it down." -- sometimes you simply have to be devious/evil!
Cheers,
Norm.
Derek: I don't really know what you should do with this. Maybe keep pestering them a few times might ultimately get a response, if you have the patience. Otherwise, now that the work is done, hold on to the work until someone somewhere gives or gets the go-ahead for it to be released. This is what we do with the QL software we have preserved - we daren't release most of it without permission, but people like Rich have done some great work tracking people down so that the stuff can eventually be re-released freely or commercially. At least once preserved, it's ready to go when permission is ultimately obtained.
It's tempting to say look at the number of sites that release stuff as "abandonware" and such like, and how many of them didn't get shut down as long as it was shown that no profit was being made. However, those with legal training and those who work in the computer industry would presumably say a very firm *NO* to that approach too.
What I would say is that should you decide to release it without permission, be prepared to have to remove it very quickly if told to do so!