:shock: Are you serious!! :shock: This isn’t funny Michael. Please tell us you’re just kidding.
If you’re not this is a very very sad day. :sad:
wow!
Ed I hope its a joke.
with so many alternative ways to finance.
Please do share.
I thought the very same thing when I talked to The Weather Channel last week. Their VP of Business Development wanted to license me their data for “millions a year”. No joke.
Did you make a counter offer? Bargaining is all about offers and counter offers. Microsoft and Yahoo are a good example. You could have offered 10% of your WW profits each year. 15% if they pressed you.
BTW Speaking of profits, WWL is $19.95 USD/year?? When did this happen? And what happens the following year? It stops working or stops getting updates?
An alternative to stopping WW, make it Open Source and release it on the web. Let others maintain it. What language is it in?
So, I see you’ve never chatted with The Weather Channel :icon_smile: I have… many times. They want 65% of the WW profits, plus a separate payment to license all of the data that WW provides.
Today. The same thing will happen when you stop paying for a magazine subscription. You don’t read anymore.
A WWL subscription costs $19.95 per year. That’s $1.66 per month. Or $0.05 per day.
Bad idea. I’m thinking The Weather Channel has access to better lawyers than the average open source developer can afford.
They can’t sue everybody and I doubt they care what people develop for their own use.
In that you have no further use for the code please post it as Open Source. It may become a PortableApp app or maybe Mozilla will pick it up.
Very sad indeed. I have been using this program for years - it works better than WWL in South Africa, where I live.
Will it continue to work though? It is still updating now …
paulderdash, it could work for many years. Nobody knows. The important thing to remember is that it is now only available as-is.
That’s a bad news. I’ve been using Weather Watcher for years and I find it as the one and only weather software. It’s the most accurate of all I’ve tried (and I tried many). It’s interface is perfect far more better than WWL.
So, Weather Watcher v5.6.53 is the last one that will use the weather.com? It’s the most accurate for my city…
olo, if you like The Weather Channel’s data, then you might want to try Desktop Max. That application is probably the only other weather application that will give you the same data as found in Weather Watcher. There are many weather applications that use The Weather Channel’s data, but almost all of them are displaying very limited sets of weather data.
If you package the source under the OSL license and upload it to SourceForge others can maintain it and it can survive. Throwing it away is a lose for everyone, particularly for all the time and effort you have spent on it over the years. You can copyright the name Weather Watcher such that other versions of the source can’t use the Weather Watcher name, similar to the FireFox concept, if that’s a concern of yours.
I just hate seeing all your work going to waste.
I think the point that he is making, Ed, is that TWC is not going to let him offer the source up b/c it still makes use of TWC data - anyone wanting to use it now is going to get hammered in terms of startup costs just to acquire the data.
Unless someone happens to be friends with Sir Richard Branson and can convince him to donate $100 M to Mike, I think this is a done deal.
As for the offer from TWC, they want %65 of the subscription fee, and are only offering the current weather data, a 3-day forecast, and no hourly data. And, yes, Richard will definitely be needed in order to get even an hour of their hourly data…
Just wait until the conglomerates like Clear Channel break up - then they’ll be scrambling to make a dollar of a week’s data as indie stations go with wunderground…
No doubt… their day is coming. With companies like WeatherBug and Weather Underground around, I don’t even know how TWC makes a buck (maybe their nice website?). They are normally serving up weather conditions that are 40 minutes old… and they seem to hire people who do a lot of “old” thinking. That’s why I like working with WeatherBug so much – they are open to pretty much any idea I throw at them.
I bet even money they had exclusivity deals for a set period, like maybe a decade, and a lot of those are running out now, as more and more stations are getting enough funding to have their own in-house meteorologists and equipment for real time forecasting…
So they are already scrambling, and probably only staying afloat via advertising revenue and as well as from being owned by CNN / Time Warner…
This Is very sad news indeed 
I have been using Weather Watcher for so long now: seems to be the only program that i always keep when I change computer. In my region in France Weather Watcher Live is not as all as good as it doesn’t give detailed results for the following week! I will certainly keep on with Weather Watcher as long as it works!
I don’t think TWC can not stop someone from posting code to Open Source.
Ed_P, you are correct. They could certainly take it, change it around a little bit, call it their own, and start selling it though. It would be such any easy thing for them to do since it uses their data source.