[Homepage] [About Renegade] [Renegade Discussion Forums]
[Project Status] [Feature Requests] [Project News] [Downloads]

The Renegade BBS Project

Welcome to the new home of the Renegade BBS project on Sourceforge.net. This site replaces the old site at http://www.snowpoint.com/renegade. Please update your bookmarks appropriately.

What is Renegade?

Renegade is a BBS, or Bulletin Board System. It has its roots in the earliest days of desktop computing, when there was no Internet for the average user, and people used modems to communicate with systems all over the world, exchanging messages and playing games.

The Internet has largely supplanted the old DOS-based BBS system, but there are those who think that BBSes still have a place in the modern computing world. Renegade was originally developed by Cott Lang in Pascal. Cott actually based Renegade on the source code for Telegard, another, earlier BBS package which is still available today. At the time, Telegard was based on an even earlier BBS system called WWIV (World War IV).

At the time Renegade was developed and being maintained by Cott, there was little or "no Open-Source software- the idea hadn't yet really occured to anyone.

Also, because the source code for Renegade was based on copyrighted sources, there was no way for Renegade to be made open-source, even if Cott had been inclined to do so.

Over time, Cott became less interested in the ongoing development of Renegade, and passed the baton to another developer, Patrick Spence. Patrick put out a Y2K-compliant version of Renegade, together with some patches for previous versions.

After some time, another developer, Corey Snow, became interested in bringing Renegade "back to life", so to speak. Many had pronounced Renegade "dead" as there had been no release or much activity for some time. After some discussion, Corey was given the source code to Renegade, in Pascal, under the agreement that the source code would never be released.

Open Source Renegade

Because Renegade is written in Pascal for DOS, it is not really feasible to continue to maintain it as it currently exists. Corey and many other Renegade users (the few who are left) feel that an open-source version of Renegade is the best alternative, but that means essentially rewriting the product, from the ground up, using a new language, not using any of the original code.

[Homepage] [About Renegade] [Renegade Discussion Forums]
[Project Status] [Feature Requests] [Project News] [Downloads]

SourceForge.net Logo