2006 Developers Conference?

[Brian K. White]

> Heck, everyone should be using fpGUI instead of PuTTy or Anzio Windows 
> clients. That is the great shame in all this. However with the clarity of 
> a monday morning quarterback, it should have been priced so that a person 
> would be insane not to deploy fpGUI.

Price had little to do with why we don't use it. We tested it. granted it 
was some time ago but really, this is fptech, has it changed fundamentally 
since it was first introduced?
Is it faster?
Is it less delicate to get working?
Is it less delicate to keep working?

The bs with the licencing going invalid based on ip address or hard drive 
serial number, I can't have that. I don't want to pirate anything, I just 
can't live with something that delicate. Or we'll say, I simply won't. 
Justified or not, I reject relying on any software that I can't install, 
fix, move, copy, backup, restore completely under my own power, forever, 
except when absolutely necessary. The only thing like that I even use is 
FacetWin, and that's not critical. I can swap it out for any number of other 
things the moment I need to. If it stopped working the business would run 
without it. It would be inconvenient for reasons I'm about to describe, but 
it wouldn't stop or even much slow down the show.

Then again, suppose all the efficiency and robustness issues were resolved. 
Price does still come in.
We have been been very successful with a subscription based model where 
clients install a free, light weight, absolutely trouble-free, 
complication-free, client-side terminal emulator, and log in to our server 
via it.

We can only do this because the client, FacetWin, is free. It's expensive, 
but it's licenced on the server side and the client windows installer is 
free.
For myself personally, as a guy who uses a terminal emulator to connect to 
lots of different machines, this is the worst possible arrangement. I need 
to be able to use my one copy of something to connect to any machine I want, 
using any of at least half a dozen protocols, connecting to machines ranging 
from routers and other network appliances to any of a dozen different OS's 
of all ages.

But for end users of a subscription system like this, the free client and 
server side licensing is the ideal and it doesn't matter that the client is 
proprietary and only works with the matching proprietary server.
The user doesn't have to do anything but click on the link to the setup.exe 
and "next" though everything. They don't have to even punch in a license 
number or even a web page password.
We don't even have to walk most users through the install over the phone. 
They do that on their own long before they ever call us while they are still 
just poking around on the web site looking at the demo.
This kind of streamlining is all-important. Does the fpgui have a client 
that can be posted on a public, un-passworded web page, that can be 
installed in one click (or a few no-thinking-required "next" clicks), on any 
random computer a user finds him/herself in front of? A java or activex 
client that runs all in the browser with no install would be even more 
streamlined of course, but then I don't think it's possible for them to be 
as fast & light as a traditional native client, not to mention surely being 
a constant victim of antivirus and antiadware and other security measures. 
Now that Anzio has a plain text config file (that can be generated by a cgi 
script or filepro, etc...), and given other new options it has like 
embedding connection details in the executable name, it's possible to make a 
streamlined Anzio based login too. In fact, it can be even more streamilined 
because it doesn't really need to be "installed" but can be run directly 
like putty. Except for the licensing of the client. I can't put an Anzio 
binary on a public web page and tell everyone in the world to download it at 
will. And I don't know if it's even possible (regardless of legality) to 
cause that binary to be fully licensed without the end user ever punching in 
the license numbers or even seeing the license dialog.

It's not so much that punching in a license number one time is so horrible, 
although it is worth a lot to avoid it. The real point is that it's not 
possible for the client to stop working due to licensing. The licensing that 
can break is all on the server where I deal with it and it's just one or a 
few licence numbers for the whole server, administered in one place, one 
time, etc... not on each desk or even in each users .profile or home dir on 
the one server but just one spot in the server daemon admin.

Brian K. White  --  brian at aljex.com  --  http://www.aljex.com/bkw/
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