Why do you guys pay for Poker Tracker?

[Phil153]

Warrior,

No one here is knocking open source. Most people in this thread are aware of Linux/Unix, how it began, and how important it was for software development. I think the open source movement is a great idea. And I definitely have no desire to help some random internet vendor make another half a mil.

The "negativity" in this thread started because of comments like this:

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I am wondering why you guys, some with programming experience choose a program that you must pay for to do the simple action of converting flat text files into a working database.

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This is a tiny fraction of the programming work required to create a PokerTracker clone. The fact that you trivialize the program suggests to those who have written working, real world software that you aren't aware of the amount of effort and commitment required to do a project of this size. Comments like this:

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If any of you who have paid for the software would like to contribute it would be a huge help for me to just see some sample data of a couple hands so I can make my database somewhat compatible using PT for the base, and adding all the features that I think are necessary.

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further indicate a lack of seriousness or competence. Who begins a serious attempt at cloning a commercial product without even having examined the product in question??

If you'd come in here and said: "Hi guys, it sucks that we have to pay for Pokertracker, I'd like to start working on an open source version. I know it's a huge job but I'm willing to help code and coordinate things and if we can get some programmers behind this, it'd be great", I guarantee you'd have very different responses.

For what it's worth, there was a hand parsing project begun by bachfan about 6 months ago, a very competent coder. Basically, a lot of people write hand parsers for their custom code, which has to be updated every time a site changes. From what I understand it's set up on sourceforge, but never went beyond the design phase. If you're serious about creating an open source pokertracker and getting community support, perhaps reviving this is a good place to start?