I just came back from Barcelona and I'm astonished at all the mess that
has been created around this subject. Above all, thanks to all the
numerous people who have expressed their solidarity, either on a public
list or privately. I'll have to give my own view of the subject, and
therefore I'll have to repeat a lot of things which have already been
said in other lists. This will make this mail quite long, for which I
apologize in advance.
>By chance I got a copy of Jose Maria's note LISTSEND V1.1
>and I there is a need to make some corrections:
I'm afraid this is not exactly "by chance" -- or it is a real
coincidence. My personal guess is as follows: the most important EARN
volunteers and myself announced quite a long ago that we would withdraw
our support to EARN if the EARN BoD continued to ignore the real
technical problems of the network and the work done by the volunteers.
The BoD probably thought that this was only some kind of funny statement,
since they didn't react until this withdrawal was started to be
implemented. Then they had a meeting, in which they discussed about
volunteer work. Of course they found inacceptable that some volunteers
dared to publicly oppose to the BoD. The strategy they are following is
clear: Berthold cannot complain too much, he's an IBM guy and IBM would
force him to work in something else if he complains too much; Ulrich's
boss can be lets say paid so that Ulrich cannot complain any more; they
thought that they could coerce myself with this kind of public attacks,
and then only Eric is left. Eric is much more difficult to convince,
especially because there's no way at all to force him to continue
supporting LISTSERV and they are intelligent enough to realize that
LISTSERV is essential to the network. So the objective was to isolate
Eric so that he could not claim any longer to defend the EARN users point
of view. What I find most shocking in all this attitude of the BoD,
regardless of its infimum moral category, is that they still have not
spent a single bit of their precious time to consider the criticisms we
made. I must conclude, in view of this aggresive attitude, that they do
not and will not consider our point of view. In these conditions, I can
no longer work for EARN, since my view of what EARN is and the BoD's one
are completely contradictory.
>
>>Please note that the availability of LISTSEND V1.1 makes obsolete the previous
>>version of LISTSEND, which I will no longer support, fix or distribute.
>>Following the new policy for volunteer software, LISTSEND is NOT available to
>>EARN users, but only to BITNET and NetNorth. I've moved the EARN AFDs to
>>LISTSEND EXEC to a separate file, which I may restore later if the EARN
>>situation betters.
I just want to mention again that this policy was detailedly explained in
EARNTECH two months ago. I don't know whether Klaus subscribes to
EARNTECH, but Michael Hebgen certainly does, and they communicate
regularly. I did not get any kind of commentary then.
>1. Jose Maria is not an EARN volunteer! It is his Job to
> contribute to the operation and development of EARN and DFN.
> He is paid for this by GMD.
GMD pays me a salary to work 40 hours a week to keep the DEARN machine
running. There's no part in my contract which says that I should work 70
hours a week, come all weekends, develop LISTSEND or LSVTALK, or install
any new list, for example. I'm doing this kind of things just because I
find them nice. My job is strictly that of a Country Coordinator, and
this has never included anything related to software development.
There's something you can *never* contract someone to do: to find which
are the user's needs and to be able to write something which fills these
needs. Of course you can make a Committee of Experts to evaluate which
are these needs, then hire some programmers to implement these. You will
then have nice OSI prototypes which work only on an IBM 3090 with SNA and
SQL and are buggy and unusable. On the other side, and provided that the
atmostphere in the network is one of cooperation and fair play, which is
certainly not the case now, you will always find numerous people who will
like to do some extra work for the only pleasure of helping the network.
LISTSEND is such an example. I started writing it in my spare time when I
was at EB0UB011, and less than 10% of the code has been written at GMD. I
changed my job, and nevertheless I continued to maintain it. If it were
considered the property of EB0 (or of GMD for that matter), nobody would
have cared to maintain it. Amongst other things because nobody would have
been able to. I find that it is much more important for the network that
this kind of utilities are supported than to try to enforce ridiculous
company-dependent policies which in any case can only make of a
cooperative network an inefficient legalistic mess.
I'd also like to point that most value-added EARN services (as LISTSERV,
MAILER or RELAY) have been developped on a volunteer basis.
>2. Although GMD isn't allways in favour of EARN decissions
> GMD does not not support any strategy of imposing pressure
> on the EARN administration by selectively distributing
> technical solutions everywhere but within EARN. This is not
> a way to improove EARN, it is destructive.
LISTSEND is not GMD work. It's *my* work, and I am fully responsible for
it. This includes development and distribution policies. What I find
really destructive is the way you and others are mismanaging EARN. Since
you happen to be in a position to force people who do real work to follow
your orders and you use your privilege, you've got two things: I'll not
do anything else which is beyond the scope of my contract (i.e. no more
volunteer work), and I will do all my best to stop working for EARN at
all as soon as legal and personal constraints allow. This includes that
you'll have to find a new person to work as a German NCC.
>3. Since Jose Maria is employed by GMD and since the developments
> he announced where on base of GMD-owned ressources he is not
> authorized to give any statements on the availability. This
> is especially true for strange and unjustified statements that
> do not agree to GMD policy.
>
>So the best thing to do for now is to ignore Jose Maria's quoted
>paragraph. I guess better news are to follow when Jose Maria is
>back from hollidays.
This has already been mentioned, but it's really BAD STYLE to send this
attack while I'm in vacations. If you want better news you'll have to
write them yourself.
Before finishing, let me make some phylosophical statements about
volunteer work and legal ownership. When I came to GMD, I did so with a
lot of utilities and experience. These utilities (which have not been
touched and therefore are not the property of GMD) are actively used by
everybody who uses VM at GMD. Most of them were developed by me at other
places. I never tried to sell them to GMD; in fact I never cared to make
some marketing to explain how much software you got for free, and now I
realize this was an error. The same applies to experience: I installed a
complicated but very useful software sharing mechanism between DEARN and
DBNGMD12, using LISTSERV and my experience with it. A normal programmer,
with only some VM experience, would not have been able to manage this
complexity, and therefore would have had to maintain everything by hand,
with the usual consequences of lack of synchronization, documentation,
etc. This is a GIFT I made to GMD, and it's the first time I mention it.
You cannot find any legal trick to claim that this software is yours. In
the same way that you cannot pretend to be the owner of my initiative, my
creativity, my experience, or even my legs, for that matter. You've been
paying for a VM expert, not for all the extra work. Since I've never
expressed any kind of monetary interest for this extra work, I had
thought the game was one of cooperation, which I think is always much
more useful and productive than legalism. Now I see this is not the case.
This can seem too much detail about the internal GMD structure; if I have
explained it here, this is because I think this is a general problem of
most companies, and, worse, it's becoming one of the worse problems of
EARN. Look at BITNET: the management of BITNET subscribes to most lists,
including non-official ones as 1745-L. They pay attention to what's going
on, reply if necessary, and keep a cooperative attitude with the
volunteers, so that everything goes fine. EARN seems to have firmly
decided to evolve into a bureauchratic monster, killing all personal
initiative under legalisms and nasty pressures. Well you'll get what
you're looking for.
>Klaus Birkenbihl
Jose Maria
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