Columbia Kermit/kermit.zip/newsgroups/misc.19960425-19960715/[e-mail] _Mon May 13 05:32:17 1996.msg

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From: [e-mail] (Evan Leibovitch)
Subject: Re: Kermit licensing (was: Caldera's WordPerfect)
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: Mon, 13 May 1996 02:06:59 GMT
References: <4lqr4e$[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <4n51of$[e-mail]>
Organization: Sound Software Ltd., Brampton, Ontario
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Xref: news.columbia.edu comp.os.linux.misc:119286 comp.protocols.kermit.misc:5217

In article <4n51of$[e-mail]>,
    Frank da Cruz <[e-mail]> wrote:

>We would all like it if everything were free.  The nice thing about most
>Kermit programs is that they are, indeed, free. People take them all the
>time -- thousands of times a day according to our ftp statistics -- and
>use them without paying a penny. [...]

>These programs, however, may not be freely redistributed by companies to
>their customers and clients, companies like:

>: | Evan Leibovitch, Sound Software Ltd., ...
>: | Caldera Business Partner / SCO Authorized VAR / ...

Ah, so they're NOT free ... make up your mind!

Big bloody deal. 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).

(All for their own research purposes, of course.)

You haven't hurt me or them, just cause a minor inconvenience. The cost
of the inconvenience, however, will be the ultimate demise of the Kermit
Project.

>They have to license it, and that will cost them some money.

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.

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.

Columbia takes delight in advocating the totally arbitrary double
standard that allows (even encourages) commercial ISPs to make money
off peoples' aquisition of Kermit, but not hard-media distributors.

>we are a full-time nonprofit self-funding university-based
>R&D group that produces software used and depended upon by millions of
>individuals, by universities, government agencies, and companies all over
>the world.

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!

>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).

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.

>Suppose their products, and hence their
>customers, come to depend on Kermit, and the Kermit Project disappears for
>lack of funds?

Yes, let's suppose...

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.

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.

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.

What's your point?

>Most companies that need to incorporate our software into their products,
>or distribute it to their customers or clients, however, are glad to
>license it from us, and we are happy to work with them to tailor it to
>their needs.  A good example would be the version of C-Kermit that was
>developed by us for HP-UX 10.0 in cooperation with Hewlett Packard.  All
>HP-UX 10.0 users have it, and everybody's happy.

How good for you. How good for HP.

Under your scenario above, if the Kermit Project ceased to exist,
HP may well have spent its Kermit money on a programmer to extend
functionality, rather than to subsidize Columbia's bureaucracy.

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.

It would seriously surprise me to hear you're netting any money at
all on Kermit95. Columbia made good on its intentions to go full-blown
commercial with Kermit95 -- why else would Kermit people go ape over the
thought of their work being commercially exploited unless they saw the
others as competition? Yet there's not a single computer store, bookshop,
or distributor that I know that sells it. The Kermit Project's disgust
for commercial enterprises has come back to bite it in the tail, as
technically inferior products such as TinyTerm eat Kermit95 for lunch
in the marketplace.

Heck, it wasn't that long ago that I would have helped your stuff sell.
I've personally been responsible for quite a few sales of your C Kermit
book, and if you go *way* back you'll find my name on the earliest
Kermit mailing lists, as someone who bought *original* Kermit tapes and
documentation. (I still have my copy of Kermit News, Volume 1 Number 1,
dated July 1986 on green paper.) So, yes, I was an early supporter *and*
financial contributor, at a time when you could count the number of Kermit
users in Nevada in single digits. I did so out of a sense of community,
believing strongly in the original intent of the authors:

   "The Kermit software -- including source -- is furnished free,
   without license, or restrictions on copying or redistribution
   provided that it is not sold for profit, and that any copyright
   notice are left intact."
                   [ Kermit News, July 1986, Page 4 ]

Somewhere, sometime, the Kermit Project either got a bad infection of
socialist anti-commercialism dogma, or a desire to limit commercial
use so that Columbia alone could exploit Kermit commercially. The
simplicity of the above copyright was warped into a nasty set of
restrictions that made Kermit less usable and harder to get, just as
so much of the freeware community (led by UCB and the FSF) was *easing*
restrictions on commercial use. As the freeware world was embracing
the GPL and the copyleft, Columbia stood alone in actively rejecting
its principles.

As an initial contributor and supporter, I had been betrayed.

It is the Kermit Project's full right to make any kind of policies
regarding the copyright of the base Kermit products, no matter how
unpopular, counterproductive, or hypocritical these policies are. It
is also my right  -- my obligation -- to point out the horrific flaws
in said policies. And it is certainly my right to advocate a boycott of
funding the Kermit Project or buying any Kemit books or software, because
of these anti-commercial policies. I have not taken my boycott call
public until this message, it has been strictly word-of-mouth 'till now.

When this issue has come up before, Frank and I have merely agreed to
disagree. All that has changed is that Frank chose to step into an
unrelated discussion in a Linux newsgroup. I was pointing out the irony
of a Columbia student whining that he couldn't get an educational discount
off a commercial product, while Columbia (thorugh its Kermit Project) rails
against the evils of commercialism....

(...unless, of course, it's Columbia's own form of commercialism.)

--
 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