Rainmaker Redux XIII:

Up Against the Wall

One thing is for certain: put a rainmaker up against the wall and you've got a lethal weapon within arm's reach. They get nasty.

You've all heard stories like this before, but here's a few new twists:

Billy Buckle

radsoft.net carried a story on Bill Buckels' Garbage (sic). The response was at once irate and insulting, not to say arrogant.

• radsoft.net showed 'arrogant disregard' for Billy's 'personal privacy' by emailing him with a URL he carries in the frame margin on every page of his site.
• radsoft.net was just 'another punk with a Hotmail address'.
• His, the site of Bill Buckels Software Engineer, despite his own efforts to increase traffic by recent uploads to ZD, was a 'small private family site' and we were in effect 'trespassing' by even visiting it.
• Garbage was listed and available for download 'only for nostaligic reasons', this despite his having worked over the site extensively in preparation for the visitors from ZD Net only a few weeks earlier.

When radsoft.net went public with this scathing evidence, Buckels went raving mad. He tried every trick in the book to try to make us stop.

In the end, he pleaded bad health and a severe condition which debilitated his ordinary sense of calm and his calm common sense. He also admitted that everything he'd been doing was - as we had claimed - that of a complete lunatic.

And he finally sent us this letter:

I was wrong to react to your first mail so strongly. And I was careless to
post the Garbage.Exe program on my website. I must be 'blind as a bat'!

The thought of anyone even trying to use one of my programs without positive
results does not thrill me and Windows 31 is dead anyway so why bother with
Garbage.Exe?

* * *

While this does not excuse me from my initial reaction, and hardly impairs
my intellectual capacity, it does impair my logic somewhat, and it possibly
explains why I over-reacted to your initial mail. I feel a little embarassed
to be sharing this information with you, and to do so initally would have
been more than I could have done or trusted.

I honestly can't remember what motivated me to even bother to post this
program since I haven't used it for years.

One more thing and then I must run... I can barely stand to listen to your
description of people using this program when it doesn't work. It doesn't
make me angry anymore, but it still makes me wish that I'd never even posted
it. I did not get into writing software to create programs that don't work.
There is no fun or honour in that.

There is also no fun or honour in carrying-on fighting with you nor with
anyone else, and I will try to remember that going forward.

I will also firmly bury the hatchet with you. I would like to walk away from
this with some dignity. I feel completely ridiculed at the moment.

> - Why didn't you declare Garbage as Win16 before?

It didn't even cross my mind. Declaring any program as Win16 would never
have crossed my mind.

Sure. Every other program on his site makes very proud claims about its
suitability for various operating systems - and Mr. Buckels knew he was
going to get quite a lot of visitors - see below.

> - Who submitted the Garbage URL to Google in April 2000?

It wasn't me. However if google spiders my website then they could have
combed this-up themselves. I never even heard of you or google until the
other week.

But it was him - indirectly. The month before he submitted a 600KB bundle
of 'copyleft' materials to - guess who - ZD Net. This was what caused the
stir, and it was all very expected.

Every program description on the site had been updated in preparation for
the new visitors...

> - What copyrighted materials were supposedly stolen?

All the excerpts that were quoted from the read-me together with the
webpages that you redistributed as garbage.zip and the graphics that I did.
Stolen is a strong word. I would now say 'used against my wishes' would be
more precise.

Yes, stolen is a very strong word. But when Mr. Buckels was exposed he did
not think twice about using strong words. The Garbage pages were cached in
case the rainmaker later claimed the world was all wrong about him.

> - Why remove the program if you think you are right?

I don't think I am right and I don't think that any purpose will be served
by me disagreeing with you further if at all.

Thank you Bill - but that didn't exactly answer the question, did it?

The entire letter was dictated by a solicitor - but why? And what did Billy Buckle have to feel so ashamed about? And above all, what made him suddenly 'calm down' and plead ill health and a deluge of unpaid bills?

  Buckabang!