kermit.columbia.edu/kermit.columbia.edu.tar/kermit.columbia.edu/newsgroups/misc.19960425-19960715/[e-mail] _Mon May 13 19:09:40 1996.msg

Internet Message Format | 1996-07-26 | 16KB

Return-Path: [e-mail]
Received: from apakabar.cc.columbia.edu (apakabar.cc.columbia.edu [128.59.35.159]) by watsun.cc.columbia.edu (8.7.5/8.7.3) with ESMTP id TAA15468 for <kermit.misc@watsun>; Mon, 13 May 1996 19:08:28 -0400 (EDT)
Received: (from news@localhost) by apakabar.cc.columbia.edu (8.7.5/8.7.3) id TAA15025 for kermit.misc@watsun; Mon, 13 May 1996 19:08:26 -0400 (EDT)
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc,comp.protocols.kermit.misc
Path: news.columbia.edu!sol.ctr.columbia.edu!news.uoregon.edu!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!newsfeed.internetmci.com!in2.uu.net!news3.ottawa.istar.net!istar.net!infoshare!whome!telly!evan
From: [e-mail] (Evan Leibovitch)
Subject: Re: Kermit licensing (was: Caldera's WordPerfect)
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: Mon, 13 May 1996 17:18:11 GMT
References: <4lqr4e$[e-mail]> <4n51of$[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Organization: Sound Software Ltd., Brampton, Ontario
Lines: 308
Xref: news.columbia.edu comp.os.linux.misc:119437 comp.protocols.kermit.misc:5226

In article <[e-mail]>,
    Terry Kennedy, Operations Mgr. <[e-mail]> wrote:

>> I just give instructions so that my clients can fetch Kermit
>> themselves --  that is, those clients who still need it; fewer and fewer
>> of them do (see below).

>I think you're missing the point. If someone fetches Kermit from Columbia
>and installs it, then a) they have an idea where it comes from, and b) they
>might have even read the info on support.

Anyone who reads a copyright message knows where a piece of software
came from. Why does this matter, unless (as in the case of Kermit and
no other freeware model) the (chief) author wants a piece of the action.

As for support, there are very active communities providing support for
software that doesn't have an 'official' support mechanism; Linux being
the best example. Those wanting support can pay for it from
organizations such as Red Hat or Cygnus or Caldera; those who don't
need support, even if they use Linux for commercial purposes or
distribute Linux to clients, don't have that bother.

>I have personally seen a number of cases where Kermit "came with" another
>package or system and the vendor of that other package or system told their
>customers "just call Columbia for free support".

And Columbia, by providing an 'official' help desk, merely plays into
the hands of those vendors.

So scrap the help desk, eliminate the costs of maintaining Kermit,
and get rid of the feeble attempts at revenue-gathering.

>As I understand it, the reason you (or any other individual) can still
>fetch copies of Kermit executables or sources is *because* the Kermit folks
>want you to be able to have them for free.

...as long as I'm not an Evil Commercial Entity, in which case Columbia
wants a piece of the action, even if I never use their help desk.

>They just don't want anyone else
>making money off the software without giving something back to support fur-
>ther development or support.

The ways in which people 'give something back' can take many forms.
Columbia wishes to impose the form that 'something back' takes, in
a manner that no other freeware imposes.

>> At one time I regularly encouraged customers to buy the books which
>> included the Kermit programming. I've stopped that practise, as
>> part of my own personal boycott of Columbia's insane distribution
>> policies.

> As a user and developer, I was upset when I first heard that the MS-DOS
>Kermit documentation was being frozen in favor of the commercial Kermit
>book. However, the documentation (in the form of the book) is vastly im-
>proved from the notes that shipped with earlier versions of MS-Kermit.
>When my users ask me questions, I point them to our bookstore and tell
>them to go buy the manual (or read a copy in our library if they prefer).

Indeed. This is a wonderful model, which is used well in a number of
instances, the one that comes to mind first is TeX:

Like the software? Want to support the author's work? Buy the books.
Every client to whom I have distributed TeX has bought the TeXbook.
Ditto for Perl and the O'Reilly books.

The Kermit model is different. Their slant is that the only way you can
buy a hard-media (floppy or CD) distribution is if Columbia makes money
on it. It's not voluntary the way TeX or Perl is; it's forced.

Columbia, in an interest of maintaining a self-justifying bureaucracy,
has created a help desk and then exhibited very commercial tendencies
(for a supposedly non-commercial body) in order to recoup the costs of
this very unnecessary "feature".

>Would you have any complaints if the books were from an independent
>source (say, "Kermit for Dummies")? If that's Ok with you, aren't you
>applying a double standard here?

I don't at all complain about the Columbia Kermit books. In the spirit
of other packages such as Perl and TeX, book royalties are an excellent
manner to reward the author of a work of software that you use.

But the TeX and Perl books still sell despite there being no 'official'
help sites for those products, and despite the lack of restrictions on
their distributions (commercial or otherwise).

I have no complaint about the use of books. My complaint is with
Columbia's restrictions that effectively make them the *only* way
one may obtain Kermit by floppy disk.

>> Kermit's absolutely assinine and arbitrary distribution procedures
>> (you can download it for free, but you can't get it freely on a CD)
>> hurt only the end-users.

>I can do that with Netscape too. Doesn't seem to have hurt either
>Netscape-the-company or Netscape-the-product.

Indeed. But at least Netscape doesn't make any protestations about
it being a not-for-profit entity, it makes no attempt to hide its
capitalism. Columbia has merely become just another software vendor,
with certain conditions under which its software is obtainable for
free.

>And if I'm not an edu-
>cational site, I have to either pay for Netscape after 30 days or cease
>using it, while I can continue to use the Kermit I downloaded forever.

Almost every software vendor offers educational discounts (that's what
started this thread in the first place). Netscape's is a little more
generous than others.

Frankly, I consider your analogies between Netscape and Kermit to be
very apt -- yet one hides under the guise of being non-profit, the other
does not.

>> Yup, software that involved the contributions of hundreds, of people
>> outside of Columbia who haven't received a cent either. Yet Columbia
>> now derives revenue from their efforts, and has indulged in policies
>> that prohobit outsiders from exploiting the value of Kermit, as Kermit
>> has exploited the value of outsiders in the past. How hypocritical!

>How much work have you contributed to Kermit?

I am not a programmer. In the days I first used Kermit, the way for
non-programmers to contribute was to buy Kermit documentation or 9-track
tapes direct from Columbia. I did that.

What's your point?

>Look at people like Joe
>Doupnik (MS-Kermit) or the people like myself who contributed to C-Kermit.
>The fact that I'm writing this might give you an idea that I'm not being
>"expolited".

Bully for you. Were you ever given the choice? Were you, or Joe or other
contributing bodies like the University of Toronto or Steven Institute
of Technology ever *offered* a share of the revenue Columbia would earn
when it went commercial? When you joined the development team, when Henson
gave permission to use the name, did you know that Columbia would have
turned Kermit (or tried, at least) into a commercial product?

That you do not object to Columbia exploiting your efforts is very
noble. But that does not reverse the fact that Columbia is generating
revenue, in part, from work you have done. This is exploitation by
most definitions.

How many non-Columbia volunteers have joined the Kermit development
effort in the last two years? There is none of the sense of community
development that existed when the product started, and the credits
section of the Kermit manual went on for pages.

>>>Some for-profit companies would like to take our work and gain commercial
>>>advantage from it, directly or indirectly, without contributing anything
>>>back. This is short-sighted.

>> On the contrary, my friend, this is not only not short-sighted, it is one
>> of the backbones of the Free Software Foundation, and everything produced
>> by the GNU and Linux projects (amongst many, many others).

>  So? They use one model, Kermit uses another.

That is obvious. My post is to describe the double standards and
arbitrariness of the Kermit model, and to delight in the knowledge
that nobody has followed Columbia down that road of dark ethics.

>> Kermit is in the minority; the ever-shrinking, lonely minority.
>> Far more complex and significant pieces of software than Kermit have
>> emerged that have been either indifferent or encouraging to commercial
>> distribution. Mosaic. CNews and INN. X Windows (and XFree86). TeX.

>X Windows wasn't done by uncompensated volunteers. There was some serious
>backing from the start. If Kermit had similar backing things might have been
>different.

Unless you (and the others who worked on the project) place no value on
your time and efforts, it's safe to say that a good many people gave
the Kermit Project "serious backing".

>  Today's homework assignment: go look at Ghostscript. Report back.

Assignment complete. My Ghostscript, unlike Kermit, came on a CD-ROM.
It has none of the commercial distributions restrictions that Kermit does.
It is under the GPL.

Next assignment....?

>> So what? The code, as it sits, is quite robust. If the Kermit Project
>> dissapeared tomorrow and its code GPL'd, it would live on quite well,
>> thank you. Its maintenance would be taken up by of competent programmers
>> who would extend it and support it in ways you may never have imagined.

>I really doubt that. We'd been asking for help for a *long* time and while
>we got a "sure, I'll do that" from some *very* big names in "the business",
>nothing happened. VMS C-Kermit would still be unusable if I didn't start
>fooling with it in my spare time, rewriting the file I/O from scratch and
>doing substantial work in the other OS-dependent modules. Aside from my
>changes and the work Frank did, the *only* other changes made to it were a
>few things that people found annoying enough to fix. *Nobody* else did any-
>thing with the VMS stuff, despite a large portion of the VMS community ask-
>ing for features. This is a platform where most systems have at least one
>programmer (compared with the PC platform, for example).

Hmm. Do you imagine *why* there has been so little community support
for Kermit of the kind you mention, when other freeware projects such
as Linux have been actively supported by DEC?

>> And people who wanted support would find it, even if Columbia's
>> 'services' dried up overnight. You and Christine might even see higher
>> book royalties as more people would have to RTFM if they had a problem.

>Sure. The only reason people don't have the books is because vendors
>were giving them the software without it, and because users were calling
>the "free" support number.

So get rid of the "free" support number. Not rocket science.

>> There are precedents, you know. Major pieces of work such as Postgres
>> and Smail2 have undergone major changes in stewardship, and both are as
>> useful today (if not moreso) as when they were under their inventors' wings.

>And major packages have been taken commercial as well. Most of those
>packages then abandoned development on their free versions, while the free
>Kermits are still enhanced, many by volunteers.

But they're not free to us Nasty Commercialists to redistribute, remember?
Your contribution may be voluntary, but the limitations put on Kermit
distribution most certainly are not.

>> It's all becoming a moot point anyway. The Kermit programs are fast
>> becoming dinosours, legacy tools to communicate with legacy computers,
>> required only when today's better tools like ftp or Seyon or Taylor UUCP
>> (all GPL'd tools) aren't available. Every time a CTOS or RT-11 system gets
>> switched off for the last time, another Kermit user becomes an ex-user.
>> Your user base, and your influence, is shrinking.

>A good reason for a shrinking user base was that Kermit wasn't available
>for the world's most popular platforms - the Microsoft Windows family. There
>were earlier efforts, but they stalled due to lack of volunteers.

Lack of volunteers!!!

Thank you for help proving my point. The very philosophies that the
Kermit Project thought would continue its growth, have eliminated the
sense of community that it once had, in reality strangling the growth.

The volunteers with effort and drive gravitated to the packages without
restrictions, such as Linux and GNU and *BSD (or even Seyon :-).

>Most of the computers ever built are running today, and the majority of
>them are Windows PC's. Kermit 95 is now available to meet their needs.

And it is not for sale in most quarters that people seek such software.
I've checked.

>My guess is that Kermit 95 is commercial because *nobody* could be found
>to implement it for free. The alternative was either to not write it or to
>hire someone to do the work. If someone was hired, what do you think they
>should be paid with?

If there is no need, and nobody to step forward to write it, then
*don't do it*. That is the role of the commercial marketplace; if
commercial vendors did not see the need for Kermit95, what crystal
ball at Columbia predicted *it* could make money from the effort?

Every modem sold these days comes with a wealth of communications
software; this is a *very* hard market to crack. Columbia, with
its demonstrated anti-commercial slant, is in the *least* possible
position to adequately market it.

By commercial standards, Kermit95 is a flop. But I don't think
that matters to the Project.

Why? The Kermit Project has become a massive self-perpetuating
make-work project; its quasi-commercial initiatives only exist
to help justify ongoing support by Columbia brass, on what is
essentially a mature product that needs no further continuing support.

>Kermit 95 includes *my* "labeled file" design (I suggested it, and Frank
>and Joe made improvements, and then I coded it). I'm not jumping up and down
>for a share of the profits.

How noble. Do you at least have the sense to ask for a tax receipt?
They're still non-profit, or so they claim...

>If more people were willing to contribute, maybe we wouldn't be in this
>situation, but they weren't, despite requests that occasionally took on the
>tone of out-and-out begging on the Kermit project's part.

The begging has happened, IMO, because Kermit is no longer seen as a
worthwhile project into which to put effort -- especially volunteer
effort, given Columbia's new role as a commercial vendor wannabe.

It looks from your description that the comminity programming effort
that once marked the Kermit Project is now a shadow of its former self.
And the Project has nothing upon which to blame this change except its
own pride and greed. You are to be commended for your loyalty, but
apparently not enough share your view.

Frank said in his post that allowing commercial exploitation of Kermit
without compensation to Columbia would be short-sighted. I shall allow
time to tell whether the Kermit model, or the GPL adopted by the rest of
the freeware world, is the approach that is truly self-destructive.

--
 Evan Leibovitch, Sound Software Ltd., located in beautiful Brampton, Ontario
Caldera Business Partner / SCO Authorized VAR / [e-mail] / [phone]
      Economists have successfully predicted 14 of the last 2 recessions