Path: utzoo!telly!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!bbn!bbn.com!cosell From: cosell@bbn.com (Bernie Cosell) Newsgroups: gnu.misc.discuss Subject: Re^2: Actual case of hoarding public domain code? Message-ID: <49823@bbn.COM> Date: 16 Dec 89 13:01:24 GMT References: <129245@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> <6672@columbia.edu> <263@txsil.lonestar.org> Sender: news@bbn.COM Lines: 41 steve@txsil.lonestar.org (Steve McConnel) writes: >In article <6672@columbia.edu> kearns@cs.columbia.edu writes: >>Does anyone know the facts about Scribe? >>My recollections, which are shaky at best, say that Brian Reed wrote >>Scribe, only to have it usurped by an evil company. >>I would like to know the story in greater detail, if anyone recalls it. >> >>-steve >Brian K. Reid wrote Scribe while a CS grad student at Carnegie-Mellon. >(I was a EE grad student at the time, and still have a copy of the second >edition of the Scribe User's Manual, dated 25 July 1979, for Scribe version >2A(400).) Someone convinced Brian of the commercial potential of the program, >and he sold all commercial rights to a company which I think was formed for >the purpose of selling Scribe and related software. There was a big hassle >for awhile with C-MU trying to claim ownership and therefore collect all the >profits, but as i recall, the final decision was that, as a grad student, >Brian indeed had the rights to Scribe and could sell the program and collect >the profits if he wished. We can just ASK Brian, of course [reid@decwrl.dec.com ought to do, I'd guess], but the twist on this was that Brian did scribe *as* his doctoral dissertation project [speaking of self-referential efforts]. It is often the case that schools retain interests in stuff developed "on their behalf" in exchange for a degree [isn't that the old story about Land --- he had to *refuse* his degree at Harvard or else _they_ would have claimed ownership or license or some such in his work [I think that round was his polarizing material]], so things are not always as clear cut as they seem... in fact, in some ways I'm surprised that he *did* get CMU to let him retain the rights.... >Whether it was a *good* thing for Scribe to go >commercial or not is another question, but it certainly wasn't a case of an >Evil Corporation usurping a helpless programmer. Partly... Brian has commented that he got screwed [e.g., when they charged *him* $8K for the next version or some such...:-)]... but athat was more a matter that he needed a better lawyer than that he was trampled. /b\