JQ Johnson
Feb 25 1993, 2:23 pm

Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.gopher
From: [email protected] (JQ Johnson) - Find messages by this author
Date: 25 Feb 1993 19:23:55 GMT
Local: Thurs, Feb 25 1993 2:23 pm
Subject: Re: gopher licensing
Reply to Author | Forward | Print | View Thread | Show original | Report Abuse

I am quite concerned about the licensing stance described by Mark Cahill
in his recent posting to this news group.  Although I understand and even
endorse the goals of U Minn's development group in recouping its costs by
taxing commercial use, I'm concerned that the policies as stated are
sufficiently vague to scare off lots of people.


I was pleased to see in the Network World article that U Minn plans to
allow "free use of its client/ server software as long as the information
on the server is made available free of charge on the Internet."  I think
this is a very reasonable and pragmatic definition of "commerical use."
However, it's not a statement by U Minn, and it's not legalese.  I'll hold
my breath until I see the educational-use contract I expect to need to
sign with the U. of Minn.  Absent such a contract, I'll need to
disassemble my gopher server, since our university, like many, makes some
information available only on-campus due to licensing restrictions.


As an example of another remaining problem, it is not clear to me just
what is claimed to be copyright.  Certainly the document describing the
gopher protocol.  Certainly the source code for the various clients
developed at U Minn (note that this includes derivative works including
all the bug fixes contributed by the rest of us).  I have no problems with
this.  However, is it U Minn's position that the protocol itself is
protected?  How about independently developed clients and servers?


We in the networking community and in the "open systems" community are
stuck with a few proprietary protocols.  Examples include IPX and DECnet.
But there is a very strong sentiment that protocols should be public and
freely available, even if implementations are protected.  The successful
ones in the Internet community are the ones that are non-proprietary; look
at Sun's NFS for a nice clear example of this success.


We've been burned by vendor-proprietary protocols in the past.  If the
University of Minnesota planned to try to make the gopher protocol
proprietary, then I for one would start looking for an alternative, and
would stop contributing to the gopher development effort.


--
JQ Johnson                              Office: 250E Computing Center
Director of Network Services            Internet: [email protected]
University Computing, Univ. of Oregon   voice:  (503) 346-1746
Eugene, OR  97403-1212                  fax: (503) 346-4397