After making its OmniMark programming language available for
free more than a year ago, OmniMark Technologies has apparently
done an about-face, stating at their website that "OmniMark no
longer distributes free software."
In a thread on the omnimark-coan mailing list,
OmniMark developer Harvey Thomas indicates that after
requesting clarification of the website statement, he received
the following reply from OmniMark VP for technology John
McFadden:
...rest assured that having given it our very best
try, and having received insufficient support from our user
base, free is no longer in our corporate
vocabulary.
Available for more than ten years, the OmniMark programming
language has become widely used for SGML and XML transformation
and processing tasks, finding a particular niche in the
so-called "N-Converter" tool category -- that is, as a tool for
converting non-SGML/XML data (for
example, plain text and word-processing formats) into
SGML/XML.
Despite McFadden's statement about "insufficient support"
from users, OmniMark in fact seems to have an unusually loyal,
committed, and evangelical user base. It's common to see
mailing list postings extolling the virtues of OmniMark
relative to other transformation alternatives such as Perl or
XSLT -- for example, describing the relative ease with which a
certain transformation task can be performed using
OmniMark.
The return of OmniMark to not-freely-available status may
help to make alternative utilities such as Balise more
attractive to developers. As a recent xmlhack story
indicates, it was announced at XML Europe 2000 that Balise will
(eventually) be distributed under an open-source license. Since
the announcement, however, there has been no further news
regarding Balise, though the Step GmbH
website contains the following statement:
The Balise Software will be overtaken by the Step
GmbH and will be provided free of charge shortly. For any
further information please contact us at
marketing@step.de
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