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A personal blog, by a programmer and IT expert. Essays, Articles, Guides, and Recipes. As well as Code, Quotes, and Links.

Paul Iadonisi on Gab: 'Got some very sad news this week. For anyone who …'

Paul Iadonisi on Gab: 'Got some very sad news this week. For anyone who has been in the Linux world as long as I have, it is impossible to not know about XV, an image viewer that is licensed as 'shareware', a type of license that took off in the 90s, primarily on Windows. It's basically a 'pay if you can' licenses, with some of them being nicknamed 'nagware' because they kept bugging you to pay. There were a few fits and starts in the Linux/Unix world, but shareware was mostly shunned in the Linux world in favor the GPL, BSD, and MIT licenses. But many of us, myself included, made an exception for XV. And with XV there was never any license 'key' of any kind that unlocked any features. It was just on your honor and if you look in the source code, you see one #.define in xv.h that you are 'allowed' to define with your email address saying it is registered if you paid. The fee was a mere $25 for a lifetime registration. Almost exactly 30 years ago, in a time when scanning software was nearly non-existent on Linux, I attended a Usenix/UseLinux conference and met a guy who ran a small company called http://tummy.com. He took the source of xv and patched it to provide scanning functionality. He charged $50 under the same terms as the original XV terms, and gave $25 of it to the XV author. So by way of http://tummy.com, my use of XV is 'registered', albeit under an old, defunct email address. The XV author gave up the development of XV quite some time ago, ending with the official version 3.10a. Several developers published patches to XV over the years, and he finally gave the approval in 2022 for a github repo to house XV and all the patches, lumped together into what has been termed the 'jumbo patch' for XV. (https://github.com/jasper-software/xv) Separately, I joined Vox Day's Social Galactic (SG) social media site as a side benefit of signing up at http://Unauthorized.TV where this guy named John Bradley was a member. He's a guitarist and occasional vocalist (sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNCir6HSJZo) who has been involved in some excellent meme warfare, largely in the form of music, against the boomer mentality and the retarded vaxx pushers. They used various band names such as Boomer Patrol, Booster Patrol, and Vaxx Traxx. For years I interacted with him on SG, but I never checked his profile. The sad news is that he died on March 20 at the age of 61 (https://voxday.net/2026/03/25/rip-john-bradley/). What makes it sadder for me is that I never made the connection. The John Bradley I knew and interacted with was someone I knew on SG who made funny parodies throughout the covidian insanity years. What I only found out after he passed is that he is the same John Bradley who is the author of XV, as well as few others in the early X Window system development world. This is his old XV website, where XVscan gets a mention (but following the links, unsurprisingly, eventually leads to an error): https://xv.trilon.com. Truly the end of an era. I think the last similar passing in the Linux world was Bram Moolenaar of 'vim' editor fame in August, 2023, which also had a unique license called 'Charityware' in support of 'poor children in Uganda'. RIP, John. You are already missed.'

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