Renegade (BBS)

Renegade is a freeware bulletin board system (BBS) written for IBM PC-compatible computers running MS-DOS that gained popularity among hobbyist BBSes in the early to mid 1990s. It was originally written by Cott Lang in Pascal, based on the source code of Telegard, which was in turn based on the earlier WWIV.

On April 23, 1997, after the decline of BBS popularity, Lang ceased development work on Renegade and passed it on to two Renegade BBS utility authors: Patrick Spence and Gary Hall. Spence and Hall maintained Renegade for three years, releasing three updates with their new, ordinal date version scheme.

Jeff Herrings, another former third-party software developer, was handed the source by Spence in January 2000 after offering help when he found there was no Y2K-compliant version of the software. Herrings released a public alpha version of Renegade in March 2000 addressing Y2K-compliance problems. He stepped down as active programmer in October 2001 citing lack of time and desire.

Spence eventually handed the program over to Corey Snow in 2002, who intended to release an open-source, Java-based clone of the software which never saw the light of day.

T.J. McMillen received the source code in October 2003 from Patrick Spence in a plea to have some much needed features added to Renegade. McMillen then added the help of Chris Hoppman, one of the few remaining Renegade BBS operators around. Together they released a few updates which addressed bugs and debuted some new features before Hoppman lost interest. Hoppman stepped down from the project in 2004 and is no longer involved. This left McMillen, once again, alone to carry on the Renegade code.

Herrings released his Y2K-compliant source code to the public via the Dreamland BBS in September 2005 citing he believed it was right to share a software he deemed mostly abandoned in hopes that it would see further and more active development. He felt that due to a claimed immoral injustice by Patrick Spence, he was no longer under a moral sense to oblige a previous agreement not to release the source code.