That is understandable. It reinforces my point, though, see below.

This too. Again, see below.

I can understand this. Maybe i am mistaken, but i sense a bit of ambivalence as to what the course of the further development of your pet project should be. This is not a technical question, but one of what you are most comfortable with and i suggest you think that over thoroughly before deciding finally as this decision most probably will stand, regardless of you liking it or not. You could either:

- develop it yourself and/or with hired staff. It will cost you some money to do that, but you will never give up any decisions to others. You will retain full control as to what your product is going to be. In the end you will also reap the benefits if the finished package is ever going to market.

- you could continue as an employee of some company and bring in your current project as an asset. You just turned down such an offer, but it might appeal to you in some modified way. The downside is: it will not be your project any more and maybe you will not like some or any of the decisions others will make about the package. On the other hand it might land you a well-paying job and this might alleviate soem hurt feelings.

- you could turn it into an open-source project. You will minimize your financial risk (as compared to the first option) but you will give away the power to decide the same way as with turning it over to a company. You should be aware that once you gave your project over to the public you retain some power base on the merit that you created the project, but ultimately others may eventually accumulate the same (or even more) merit and then overtrump your decisions. OSS projects tend to be a meritocracy rather than a democracy. See the dispute between Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox, for instance.

What i have written above is more for your personal benefit. As much as i like the idea of having a collaborative project going on here i don't want to take advantage of you and the other people running the site here see that similar. We are a non-profit installment and if there is anything we can give our members in exchange for the effort they put into here it is doing our utmost to keep them happy and comfortable doing what they do.

Now to my main (technical) point, for a change: it might be a good idea anyway to let your POC be what it is - a POC - and rewrite it again from scratch. First, there is the possibility to wean out all the design flaws/shortcomings one inadvertantly builds into the first design of a project.

Second, i think the shell is a very good tool for doing what you did, but the Korn Shell is way better suited for organized programming than is the bash. The ability to have library-like functions to use via the FPATH-variable for instance. The way you can handle several simultaneous I/O-streams and more. I could go on with this list. The Korn Shell is free (since 2005) like the bash and available everywhere, so this is no advantage of the bash.

But perhaps i take the second step before the first: you should come clear with your own intentions and first decide

Again: once you have finally made up your mind, i suggest you have a talk with Neo. I only moderate this board, so i do not know what he can do and/or is willing to do but in my humble opinion much of the infrastructure you say might be needed seems to be there already. There are a lot of good coders here and we might use our knowledge and abilities for something different than writing the concealed homework for students to lazy to do it themselves, for a change. Neo and scott, the admins here, btw., are very good programmers themselves, alas drowned in keeping this board running in the perfect way it runs right now.

I hope this helps.

bakunin