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Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!ames!mailrus!iuvax!bsu-cs!dhesi
From: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi)
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d,comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: requests to post zoo
Keywords: ZOO COPYRIGHT
Message-ID: <3839@bsu-cs.UUCP>
Date: 1 Sep 88 20:00:42 GMT
References: <3668@bsu-cs.UUCP> <521@irs3.UUCP> <3757@bsu-cs.UUCP> <522@irs3.UUCP>
Reply-To: dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi)
Organization: CS Dept, Ball St U, Muncie, Indiana
Lines: 78

Reference:  <522@irs3.UUCP> from blacher@irs3.UUCP (Robert Blacher).

Of the various points Robert Blacher made, I'll address just one in this
article to keep it short.  (More in the future.)  He said:

     You didn't respond to my point that CompuServe could not post ZOO
     v2.00 with its current license so I have to assume that was
     intentional.  You might as well know that the story is circulating
     that you are associated with GEnie and that the $8.00 an hour
     figure in your license was purposely chosen to allow GEnie to
     distribute ZOO but not CIS.  *If* that's true (and I mention it to
     you for the express purpose of your having a chance to dispel that
     story), then that's a real problem.  BBS sysops can't adopt ZOO or
     any other storage/compression system if the author of that system
     is going to be playing favorites.

The reason why I chose $8.00/hour as a reasonable maximum rate for
online distribution was because there were some services (People/Link,
GEnie) at around $5/hour and there were some (BIX, CompuServe, The
Source) at about $12-15/hour.  If I had to set a limit at all, it had
to fall in between these two clusterings to have any real meaning.  It
used to be $7/hour, but I bumped it up to make sure that nobody would
have to distribute the software at a loss.  (Recently, another type of
commercial service, uunet, has been created, for UNIX machine-to-
machine communications.  It started at around $4/hour via Tymnet, and
went up by a couple of dollars recently.)  I see nothing unreasonable
about my rate limit.

Bob, your phrase, "CompuServe could not post ZOO v2.00 with its current
license" is not correct.  Any online service can distribute zoo 2.0x
with only a few restrictions.  Essentially, these are:  (1) make no
attempt to restrict redistribution in any way, and (2) distribute it at
$8/hour or less.  Perhaps what you meant was that CompuServe, BIX, The
Source, whoever, choose not to follow these two requirements.  I'm not
willing to accept responsibility for their choice.

The first requirement I won't try to justify here (it was discussed in
my previous article about this subject).  The second is simply an
attempt to be a factor in the market that decides service rates.  I
firmly believe in the free market--I would be the last one to suggest
that the government set limits on rates--but I see nothing wrong with
me trying to influence the market in a small way to effect a beneficial
change.

By the way, I'm not current with what's going on in the various online
services.  It has been quite a while (since around March) that I logged
into either Compuserve, GEnie, or People/Link, and I don't know what
the current rates/policies are.

However, if you have contacts at any online service that would like to
work around these requirements without charging less or while still
attempting to restrict redistribution of software that it does not own,
I'll make you an offer:  Tell them to arrange to pay 10% of the gross
obtained from the downloads of the zoo software to the Ball State
Foundation.  This Foundation is a non-profit organization that collects
funds that it uses to further the cause of higher education.  The
online service's users will still be able to download the software, and
the online service will still make more than enough money to cover its
costs, and students in Indiana will benefit.

I won't attach a copy of the copyright statment here from the 2.01
source, because I'm about to post the whole thing to comp.sources.unix
and it's on the disks I distribute to anybody who sends disks/mailer.
But it makes it unnecessary for anybody to complain, because all
previous restrictions on versions 1.71 and earlier are lifted, and
you can distribute it with or without a compilation copyright and
at any hourly rate.  The only requirement is that you tell users before
they download that there's a later version somewhere.

Note that all versions of zoo and looz (going all the way back to 1.0)
will extract and list all archives created by all versions of zoo.  So
if anybody who distributes software at $12-15/hour is looking for a
standard, zoo 1.71 for VMS and UNIX and zoo 1.51 for MS-DOS fits the
bill.  (I don't recall the version number for AmigaDOS lower than 2.0;
probably 1.5 or 1.71.)  And don't forget that earlier versions of zoo,
and all versions of looz, sez, stuff, and atoz, are pure public
domain.
-- 
Rahul Dhesi         UUCP:  <backbones>!{iuvax,pur-ee,uunet}!bsu-cs!dhesi