Seeking Soarer - evidence thread

[webwit]

You need a bit more evidence to declare him legally dead. You're not new to the Internet. People radically quit whether a keyboard otaku or into my little pony.

Please do not argue about the law on this thread. When you do that, you jeopardize the effort.

I tried to contact you like 10 years ago but nothing but silence. And see, you have risen from the dead. Should gave snatched your stuff.

[Bjerrk]

In a zipped version of the source code for the tools, there is an old build log that contains a file system path which seemingly refers to the given name of an individual who could be soarer. I'll PM you with the details for now.

[melka]

That's why one of the questions is about discovering Soarer's meat identity.

The question I have in response to that magnificent heroic quest to doxx soarer and coax their source code out of them is : why ?

There are wonderful open source alternatives with clear licenses, especially QMK / VIA, that can be reworked to include the missing bits. I second E TwentyNine's comment about the end goal, it's not clear to me why you absolutely want soarer's code or RE it when we can work out our own solutions based on open source projects, unless you find those projects restricting in some way or another you didn't explain.

[Muirium]

unless you find those projects restricting in some way or another you didn't explain.

Correct!

We've been through all this already. Losing Soarer's work forever would be an egregious setback for many of us. Especially those who can't code to save ourselves.

[Muirium]

The only time Soarer ever actually used the word "license" on DT: and it wasn't about his work!

I've been searching his posts here for relevant terms like "my work" and can't see any mentions at all about licensing, besides his eventual desire to open source his combined converter + controller project.

I didn't have any luck finding a direct response from him to one of the several people selling adapters loaded with his firmware, either.

What you do see is a generous amount of tips and assistance to those many of us who were around back then, helping us make the most use of his work, always in the spirit of openness.

[Muirium]

As Soarer put it in his original post for his converter:

This is my Teensy-based project which adapts XT, AT and some 122 key terminal keyboards to USB, also known simply as "Soarer's Converter".

Yes, it's the same old thing that's been on geekhack for the last year, but it's now at v1.0 v1.12 and pretty much feature-complete.

So I'd like to share it here too

Looking through the documentation he includes in the download, again there is no explicit licensing!

Here is how he explains himself, from /docs/index.html

Origins

Way back in 2010, a Teensy landed on my doormat.

My goal then was simply "to make a USB adapter for my AT model F".

Why? I had modified the keyboard, and existing PS/2 to USB adapters didn't support the unusual codes created by the extra key positions.

A few months later, the first release was made available on geekhack, in my project thread.

On the release of v1.0, I also made it available on Deskthority.

I guess I got a little carried away

Looking at his controller—his last work: it's an elegant superset of his converter—again there is no mention of licensing on the original thread nor is there anything about it in the documentation within his download.

[esr]

I've gone through Soarer's DT messages. Here's what I found:

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=7424&p=146991#p146991
08 Feb 2014: Wyse Converter

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2510
22 Apr 2012: XT/AT/PS2/Terminal to USB Converter with NKRO (1.12)

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=6767&p=131548#p131548
03 Nov 2013: Soarer's Keyboard Controller firmware (1.20)

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2510&p=122796#p122796
21 Aug 2013: "I haven't opened the source yet."

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2510&p=122278#p122278
14 Aug 2013: The hint that Soarer lives in West Calder.

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2814&p=51907#p51907
11 Jun 2012: Soarer says "I'm a Brit"

viewtopic.php?f=10&t=2511&p=44403#p44403
23 Apr 2012: "We old, bro'. We old.  Reminds me of a time when even me being 30 years old was a lifetime away!"

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2510&p=44332#p44332
22 Apr 2012: XT/AT/PS2/Terminal to USB Converter with NKRO (1.2)

Am I missing any software releases? Anything else?

[esr]

We've been through all this already. Losing Soarer's work forever would be an egregious setback for many of us. Especially those who can't code to save ourselves.

I can code for myself. As I said in the OP, I have a Soarer's Converter and it makes me twitchy that I can't mod the code.

More generally, I'm doing this for the whole community. I have decades of experience to tell me that being dependent on a closed binary blob always, always, always comes back around to bite you in the ass eventually.

[Muirium]

I absolutely concur about the binary blob. Someday those 8 bit ATmega chips are going to fall out of fashion and our community will be forced to move to incompatible hardware.

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=2510&p=122278#p122278
14 Aug 2013: The hint that Soarer lives in West Calder.

Let me correct you on the West Calder part: I'm the one who lives near there! Soarer linked a distributor with an address in West Calder and I joked I could cycle by for a visit. I'd forgotten all about that little exchange.

No, I shipped Soarer a Kishsaver in 2013 and he did not live in Scotland.

[Myoth]

TMK/QMK requires reflashing the firmware every time you want to make a change and soarers has easy and robust macro support

I think soarer's is obsolete, and I say this as someone who uses it all the time. Getting on with the times and using new pieces of software means opening new horizons of possibilities. Soarer's is very convenient and supports a lot of stuff, but I think it's a much more worthwhile investment to build that same support on QMK. Right now people are trying to wrangle laws and find a, at the very least, very uninterested member of this community to open up a piece of software that's 7 years old. So much effort for legacy software. Moreover, QMK opens the possibility to use VIAL, which I would say is a massive improvement over Soarer's converter. There's no flashing involved and it even has an easy and robust macro support, I think.

[Muirium]

There's no flashing involved and it even has an easy and robust macro support, I think.

This thread's not really for talking about the pros and cons of the software in question. But I will point out that Soarer's is much better suited for a multi-keyboard converter box like mine, than any alternative I know. It can reload configurations on the fly, based on keyboard ID or assigned keystrokes, meaning I can plug in a different keyboard and it will update live, without even needing a user interface, let alone code! And can VIA do user friendly macros? Without reflashing? Without building from source? Soarer's has all of these. Its design is very different to TMK and QMK's approach, and I find for all their strengths, they have not surpassed it.

[Bjerrk]

No, I shipped Soarer a Kishsaver in 2013 and he did not live in Scotland.

... tell me more, tell me more?

[Myoth]

There's no flashing involved and it even has an easy and robust macro support, I think.

This thread's not really for talking about the pros and cons of the software in question. But I will point out that Soarer's is much better suited for a multi-keyboard converter box like mine, than any alternative I know. It can reload configurations on the fly, based on keyboard ID or assigned keystrokes, meaning I can plug in a different keyboard and it will update live, without even needing a user interface, let alone code! And can VIA do user friendly macros? Without reflashing? Without building from source? Soarer's has all of these. Its design is very different to TMK and QMK's approach, and I find for all their strengths, they have not surpassed it.

I understand that it's not about the pros and the cons of the software. I'm arguing whether or not it is worth the amount of effort to open this source when there are very well made pieces of software that could be contributed to, and eventually built to be even more efficient.

I'm not talking about VIA because it's also closed-source, it would be dumb to offer a closed source solution to a closed source problem. VIAL on the other hand is fully OSS.

The process for getting a keyboard on VIAL and ending up with a configuration like yours would be as follows (assuming you don't have to provide any kind of work to port your keyboards to VIA) :
- grab VIA compatible .hex for your keyboard #1
- plug keyboard #1
- use QMK toolbox to flash this .hex onto keyboard #1
- open VIAL, sideload VIA JSON
- program your keyboard #1 as you wish
- grab VIA compatible .hex for your keyboard #2
- plug keyboard #2
- use QMK toolbox to flash this .hex onto keyboard #2
- sideload VIA JSON
- refresh VIAL's keyboard selection
- select keyboard #2
- program your keyboard #2 as you wish

repeat as many times as you have keyboards, VIAL is truly the most hasslefree piece of software you can think of really. Having two keyboards plugged in and programming a single one of the two is made easily.

For the macros, I'm not sure because I never use macros, but I made a little test macro for this post (and also because I could not remember for the life of me the combo to open the bookmark manager). This is to make a Ctrl + Shift + O :

Spoiler:

Screenshot_238.png (20.07 KiB) Viewed 17571 times

This is my little speech I'll probably never use to get documentation on Cherry keyboards

Spoiler:

Screenshot_239.png (21.23 KiB) Viewed 17571 times

You can record macros as well, so you don't have to be unsure of what Down, Up, Tap, etc mean.


I will say though, the only big advantage of soarer over VIAL is that it does not care about the keyboard. The converter works for any keyboard of any layout as it works with scancodes. I'm not sure how VIAL could be made to work like this, a generic AT layout ? XT layout ? what about the oddballs ? But this is brain work that would greatly improve VIAL as a software, putting it to the test in a situation it wasn't made for.

[Muirium]

The rôle I'm on about is a single Teensy, hooked up to a female port, into which I plug many keyboards. (Actually 3 ports, but that's nothing the Teensy needs to care about.) That way I can keep their original cables and electronics intact. In essence, I upgrade my desk with native fluency with these old boards, instead of hacking away at all of them! Some are winkeyless, some aren't, some are ISO, some ANSI, some XT, and yet I want consistency in their layouts. So that's what I've done: made my own sneaky remaps which are automatically applied (or called for with a shortcut), while my standard suite of layers and macros runs above them. All I ever had to do, as I built up this config over the years, was tell the converter which defaults I'd like to override in each new case. Never any coding, never any downtime. Soarer's handles all of this with aplomb. It's like he made it for me!

Anyway, from what I know of both, I think porting Soarer functionality into QMK would be more work than re-building Soarer's from scratch. The philosophy, the mental model, is different. Soarer does everything for you, right away, until you tell it your changes; while QMK is a house you build up, however you want it, by yourself.

[Myoth]

The rôle I'm on about is a single Teensy, hooked up to a female port, into which I plug many keyboards.

OH, my bad, I completely misunderstood your post.

[esr]

Most of the key questions have been answered. The answers look quite promising, so far.

The thing that needs to enter the record next is this: I understand there are some converter tools projects available in source. Presumably this

https://github.com/thentenaar/sctools

is one of them.

1. What other such projects are there?

2. I need to understand the relationship between these tools and Soarer's code. Were they derived from some code Soarer wrote that I have not found? If so, did Soarer know of this derivation? If he did, and cooperated with it, that has significant implications.

[ifohancroft]

esr, point #6 in the original post still incorrectly says that his first name is Harry. It is not.

P.S. Is there still a need to go through his posts?

[Muirium]

The thing that needs to enter the record next is this: I understand there are some converter tools projects available in source. Presumably this

https://github.com/thentenaar/sctools

is one of them.

1. What other such projects are there?

2. I need to understand the relationship between these tools and Soarer's code. Were they derived from some code Soarer wrote that I have not found? If so, did Soarer know of this derivation? If he did, and cooperated with it, that has significant implications.

I suggest downloading his distribution zip and familiarising yourself with the docs and various files.

Conceptually:

• Soarer’s Converter is a closed binary blob that runs on a Teensy
• Soarer’s tools are open source command line utilities (scas, scwr, etc.) which enable you to write configurations out to the converter
• The same model firmware / tools division also applies to Soarer’s Controller

I am not a coder but I even built Soarer’s tools myself when the need arose! They are very open, and made by the man himself. Their source could be a good place to look for his intentions.

[jmaynard]

Well, the tools source would be a good place to look for his intentions, except that they give absolutely no clue as to what those intentions are. There are no license statements at all in any of the tools code that I could find. Sadly, in the absence of anything else, that means they're fully copyright protected and nobody else has any legal right to do anything at all with them.

Hence the hunt for his other intentions.

[esr]

I suggest downloading his distribution zip and familiarising yourself with the docs and various files.

Conceptually:

• Soarer’s Converter is a closed binary blob that runs on a Teensy
• Soarer’s tools are open source command line utilities (scas, scwr, etc.) which enable you to write configurations out to the converter
• The same model firmware / tools division also applies to Soarer’s Controller

OK. Downloaded. Am examining.

No license file. Well, I was past hoping for that.

I read through all 899 of Soarer's messages yesterday and they made me seriously regret that I think he's most likely dead. He was a funny, bright guy who did excellent engineering work - I would like to have known him and would cheerfully have bought him a beer. But goddammit his release practices were stupid enough to make my teeth grind. Mutter, mutter, electrical-engineer syndrome. Seen it before. Hex blobs, no license, scanty or nonexistent source code, lousy docs.

Have now read all the C code. There are MIT license headers in some of the PJRC files, but none in Soarer's. And yes, I can see that Tim Hentenaar's tools are derived from Soarer's code. They have an MIT license. Did Soarer know and approve of Tim Hentenaar's fork? If so, what evidence of that can we add to the record here?

Yes, I have emailed Tim Hentenaar asking these questions.

[esr]

Hence the hunt for his other intentions.

Happily, we have strong evidence of his intent to do an open-source release - it's all in the links upthread.

Not going to discuss ethics or legal strategy in this thread, but the above is obviously good news.

[esr]

Tim Hentenaar replied:

Unfortunately, by the time I got to it, he had already disappeared. No idea
as to the status of the hex blobs. I simply did some rework on the tools.

I'd say it's fair to say he abandoned the IP, would be nice if he would
reappear to clarify its status.

Oh well. I'm briefing him on the situation.

It looks like his source distribution is pretty much irrelevant to our problem, except in he's potentially exposed to legal liability in the same way we would be if we shipped the decompiled code.

[Weezer]

Actually what Soarer said is that he didn't want to release the source code at this time, and didn't know when he would. If he wanted to release it, he would have released it.

[Sheepless]

I am not a coder but I even built Soarer’s tools myself when the need arose! They are very open, and made by the man himself. Their source could be a good place to look for his intentions.

Could you clarify in what sense you're using the term "open", here? If you mean it in the "open source" sense, where do you see evidence for that in the tools?

I took a quick look at the source of the 1.10 tools, and if there's any evidence to be found there, I think it's negative. No indication of license, no changelog, not a single comment in the C source (not including the PJRC-copyright files, obviously). To me, this does not look like code which was written with a view to encouraging others to maintain it. It looks like it was written for an audience of one.

[ifohancroft]

Most of the key questions have been answered. The answers look quite promising, so far.

The thing that needs to enter the record next is this: I understand there are some converter tools projects available in source. Presumably this

https://github.com/thentenaar/sctools

is one of them.

1. What other such projects are there?

2. I need to understand the relationship between these tools and Soarer's code. Were they derived from some code Soarer wrote that I have not found? If so, did Soarer know of this derivation? If he did, and cooperated with it, that has significant implications.

There is this: https://github.com/Razerban/sctools

There is also this, but it's just a fork of https://github.com/thentenaar/sctools: https://github.com/ehagerty/sctools

Edit: I have missed those:
https://github.com/Razerban/sctools_macos (Fork of the one below it)
https://github.com/Kreeblah/sctools_macos

[esr]

Yes, those all seem to be forks of Tim Hentenaar's code. It's good to have their existence on the record, but I don't think the changes anything in an evidentiary way.

[Bjerrk]

2. I need to understand the relationship between these tools and Soarer's code. Were they derived from some code Soarer wrote that I have not found?

Did you perhaps read the PM I sent you?

[esr]

Did you perhaps read the PM I sent you?

Read and responded.

[shallot]

Honestly the galaxy brain tier of this thread that we should essentially dox someone (who might not even be alive?) to get the source to a horrendously outdated bit of code instead of just doing the goddamn work to do it again is absolutely insane.

How much of a dickhead are you gonna feel if you end up contacting someone's widow like "oh hi can I get your dead husband's source please"

I know who you are, you're a computer toucher, stop being lazy.

Speaking of which, I am going back to touching computers to actually do the work. smh at this thread. smh.

[Muirium]

Come off it Shallot. Read my posts would you? Especially this one:

viewtopic.php?p=487207#p487207

Build me such a multi keyboard multi config converter box and make me see the light! It’s gotta be Soarer, for all I’ve ever found.