I had a look at the utility to read 7CoG map disks. Quite sad it's closed source. I'm use Linux exclusively, have Matthias Reichl's atarisio running and would really have enjoyed this utility, because 7CoG is one of my all time favorites. But setting up a VM or even a physical machine machine only for this? Naaah... not really.
I'd like to make two points in favor of opening the source code:
1) Judging from the screenshots I imagine this program as quite nice. However, it would never make Kroah become a millionaire (if he's not one already) if he decided to commercialise it. There are simply not enough people around that still play with the old equipment. And of these few, there's even fewer that actually still have a running installation (as opposed to those that get their old gear up from the basement once a year to play 3 games and then find that another disk/floppy drive/whatever component has died in the meantime).
2) I assume the data format on the map disks must be quite simple. Even the filesystem of ATR disk images is utterly simple (I wrote a little C-program to get information about ATR disk images myself). Again, it is quite unlikely that someone will use the insights gained from data structures used on 7CoG map disks to write a new killer application that earns the author millions.
On the other hand, the utility could be used -independent of the user's platform- by the few people still playing 7CoG if the source code would be available. This way the utility could be converted into a Qt application (for example) that directly runs on Linux, MacOS and even Windows.
Just my two cents...
Cheers,
busybyte
