Auctioning Aladdin
289 words.
So I’m surfing the ‘Net and I find myself at www.novadesign.com. (I like to check in there every now and then to see if anything interesting is going on.) To my amazement, I found that they tried to auction off the source code and intellectual property of Aladdin 4D on Ebay! So I browse on over to the Ebay listing, and I’m even more amazed to see the starting bid at $35K and the Buy It Now price at $89K. Needless to say, nobody bid on it.
I’m not under any confidentiality agreements with Nova Design anymore, so I think I’m safe in disclosing that we only paid $20K for that program in, I believe, 1993 or 1994. And frankly, I’m not sure we even broke even on it. I say “only $20K,” but looking back now, that seems like a ridiculous amount of money to pay for what I considered to be nightmarishly obtuse source code. If I may humbly say so, transforming that hideous user interface that we bought into something reasonably usable was some of my most profound programming genius. Ironically enough, those changes would bring zero extra value to the software since clearly nobody would buy it now for the Amiga interface.
Just to set the record straight, the source code examples shown on the Ebay listing are NOT representative of my work on the code. Probably 99% of what was shown was written before I ever touched it.
It is a decidedly odd feeling to see one’s source code on Ebay, I have to admit.
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