I've got some good news to share with the ProTrak community and more specifically all new ProTrak users.

Background

Back on March 24-th Tom Bell (i.e. tebee) posted an inquiry on the General Discussion forum asking if ProTtrak was for sale. Quite frankly I was a little astounded that our present ProTrak community wasn't more creative in trying to help Tom become a ProTrak user. In the messages that followed I offered to make my ProTrak initialization CD available for others to use with the caveat that all those new users will be named Joe Brann. One of the latter inquiries on that thread asked if Mike Moir (Jim's brother) was a member of the forum. With no reply forthcoming I presumed that he was not. On April 7-th I sent an e-mail to Mike discussing the essence of Tom's inquiry and my offer to make my Initialization CD available to new users. I can only characterize the on-going e-mail exchanges with Mike as being super positive, and I think the best way to express that is to present to you a quote from Mike's email to me on Tuesday April 9-th.

"I’m glad that you contacted me about this. I was feeling that Jim’s legacy would be lost and I think he would be pleased that you are showing interest to help continue the program."

Isn't that what we are all about?

In Mike's first e-mail reply to me he also cc-ed Natalie and she kindly responded and I present a portion of her reply.

" I think the best way to proceed is to let ProTrak go to open source – hopefully it will be more accessible to more potential users."

Mike is proceeding with Natalie's message to make ProTrak "Open Source" i.e. to make the ProTrak executable file available to others at no cost.

On-going Activities.

There are two on-going activities to make ProTrak available to new users. These are:
1: Per Mike's request I am preparing a copy of my Initialization CD and hopefully a set of Installation instructions for Mike Corely to put in the ProTrak store, possibly in a "New User" area of the store.

2: Mike is working to find and remove all the security checks so that he can provide new users with an initialization package that does not  use my Initialization CD. This is the reason I posted an inquiry last week asking if anybody in the current ProTrak community knew VB6. Mike is not overly conversant with VB6 although he did write some of the signalling and networking pieces of the ProTrak package. So IF any of our established users could help Mike I am sure he would appreciate it. I last wrote in Basic many years ago.

Joe