$110,000 for Gated Source Code

Tue Jun 9 18:28:58 UTC 1998

> Many of our Gold member corporations want to try to provide "entry" 
> level ISP memberships.   We still are considering if we can
> continue to support (***without NSF funding) the changes you
> want so your "3.5.9" will work for linux and other OS.

So Sue, when I or another member of the community contributes the fixes
for Gated to make it work on alternative platforms and also fix bugs,
will you commit to any level of incorporation of those changes ? Will
you make sure that they only go into releases which are publicly
available ?

No. And the reasons for that are purely commercial - in the first
case the question asked is "will is increase sales ?" and in the
second case "will this decrease our market share ?".

The issue at the heart of this is that a >product< that was developed
with US goverment money (and I am not a US citizen or resident, so
what do I care ?) and with the contributions of many people outside
of either the original organisation or now Merit have been taken
over by a commercial entity.

The code for gated that is in the public archives is still available,
but is static, an because of the distribution licenses on it, cannot
be altered, maintained or distributed by anyone else - and so Merit's
monopoly becomes almost a forgone conclusion.

This discussion is getting very cyclic - let's leav Merit alone on
this and learn from our mistakes.

Regards,
-- 
Peter Galbavy
Knowledge Matters Ltd
http://www.knowledge.com /http://www.wonderland.org/ http://www.literature.org/