JQ Johnson 
Feb 25 1993, 2:23 pm

Newsgroups: comp.infosystems.gopher 
From: j...@duff.uoregon.edu (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 
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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: j...@ns.uoregon.edu 
University Computing, Univ. of Oregon   voice:  (503) 346-1746 
Eugene, OR  97403-1212                  fax: (503) 346-4397