>Eric, I don't know the details of the contract between you and Earn. Is
>there anything preventing you from distributing the code to European
>sites?
No, nothing like that. However if I did offer EARN sites to get the
current (1.6a, non-EARN, whatever you want to call it) code from me, on
an unsupported basis, it would make neither me nor EARN happy. First, the
contract says that the version I am giving to EARN is 1.5o (plus all the
optional packages, as they existed on the day I wrote the contract - may
the 10th of 1989). It explicitly says that this does not extend to
anything I might write in the future. So if I make 1.6a available to some
EARN sites and the EARN Association only has 1.5o, they will *again*
start asking for a new contract giving them the right to distribute 1.6a,
and of course they will then want 1.6b, etc. I will in any case refuse to
sign any such contract, as it basically says "I am giving version X of
LISTSERV to the EARN Association so that they can do whatever they want
about it, with the restriction that they can only distribute it to EARN
sites and they can't pretend they wrote it". I have given 1.5o, and
that's the last gift I will make to them. Accepting, on a case by case
basis, to give a copy of the software to a site for its own use, with the
clear restriction that they cannot give it out to anybody else, is
something much weaker than such a contract.
Anyway I really doubt the BoD/Exec would accept that EARN (sorry, the
EARN Association) is officially given an obsolete version of the software
to provide support and maintenance for, when in practice most EARN sites
get, officiously and in a way that completely bypasses the Exec, a more
recent version which the EARN Association is not allowed to distribute
itself.
>We could even phone your boss if it helps :-)
No need for that. The *last* thing I'm afraid of is being fired :-), and
anyway EARN can put little or no pressure on my boss or the organization
I am working for. I just don't like to have to explain long political war
stories to people who, for very understandable reasons, would like to
understand what all this mess is about and what, if any, they could do to
help solving the problem and stopping the complaints.
Eric
|