Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
When the owner of mTropolis gave it the ax, users raised money to take the code into their own hands.
Jun 10, 1998 | Lots of computer users love their software. But few in the annals of technology have gone as far as the devotees of the multimedia authoring tool mTropolis in trying to save a beloved program. When the current owner of mTropolis decided to put it out to pasture, they banded together and raised millions of dollars to buy it for themselves -- the rights, the source code, the whole caboodle.
Quark bought the program and its company, mFactory, at a fire-sale price of $2 million last year. mTropolis had been the multimedia phenom of 1996, appearing out of nowhere as the only program that could challenge the longtime leader in the field, Macromedia's venerable Director. But a series of management miscues and investor infighting left the company in Quark's hands. Quark, though, seemed an unlikely owner: It already had its own development tool, Immedia.
The release date for version 2.0 of mTropolis slipped by a year, and when it was finally ready in late April, Quark announced it would ship the upgrade free to current registered owners -- and then kill the whole project. Ouch!
Quark cited the tiny pool of mTropolis owners -- only 4,000 or so -- as the reason for killing it. But as the company's PR department soon found out, those 4,000 could scream like millions.
Upside columnist Lisa Voldeng kicked it off by announcing that Quark's executives "should be hung by their most sensitive parts." Other developers' reactions were similar, if not as graphic.
"First reaction: utter dismay. Second reaction: I wasn't particularly surprised," said Ian McMillan of Mekon Ltd. "Everybody just sort of swallowed it and said to themselves, we'd ride this [out]."
Mekon is a British design company whose multimedia work depends heavily on mTropolis. It was also the original U.K. distributor of the product. Now the company, led by McMillan, its vice president of marketing, is organizing efforts to buy the source code itself from Quark.
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