el peregringo

Scott Anguish is an old friend, and I’m damn proud to be able to say so. I met Scott online through Stepwise right after the Apple /NeXT merger. I was working at Middlebury College at the time and we were in the process of moving our development over to OpenStep. He was a major help early on, and we were fortunate enough to entice him to actually come to work for our project for a few years until the College got a new President and systematically dismantled the team, replacing it with charlatans and idiots. (but I digress)

I helped Scott move to the US. He lives just up the road a few miles from our Vermont house now. I don’t see him much anymore since I’m no longer working in tech and we’ve been out of the country for over a year, but I still read his stuff and I’m proud of the relationship we’ve had.

It’s funny, a couple of weeks back I followed a link from somewhere to the Rixstep site. I poked around and tried to figure out who the hell this guy was. He had an attitude that didn’t seem to make much sense to me. Most of the posts at his site smelled holier-than-thou, “I’m a unix guru and everyone else is moron.” I looked at a few of the utilities available and even downloaded one. As near as I could tell, virtually everything at his site already existed in some other, easier to use format. Most of it was fugly (much like the site itself). He had some asinine comment about how content was king at his site and that they wouldn’t mess up their content with unnecessary crap.

But it turns out, it isn’t his content. He’s stolen significant portions of it from Stepwise. Except for my own site, Stepwise is the only place where I’ve ever published anything. My content (First Year / 3400 Install) is on Stepwise (it’s pretty darn old–kind of like me–but it’s still there). The First Year piece was borrowed (with permission) by Apple to use as an introduction OpenStep technologies for pre-NeXT Apple engineers. Scott is thus my publisher, and now this asswipe at Rixstep is ripping off Scott, my publisher. Will my stuff be next?

I can assure you I will not ever be buying anything from Rixstep. Aside from the fact that most of it is useless, fugly reinterpretation of stuff that already exists, the guy is a thief (oh, and an asswipe, as I’ve already mentioned).