On Wed, 14 Jul 1993 14:25:01 EDT "Michael H. Morse" <[log in to unmask]>
said:
>He has done his homework and talked to Eric Thomas about the use of the
>term "listserv". He is very open to suggestions for improvement.
Well excuse me, but this is bullshit. I have explicitly asked Tasos to
change the name of his software and to remove the sentence in the help
file that claims it is a unix implementation of my software (see below).
While I admit I am not FTP'ing the software every day to see if these
changes have been made, to the best of my knowledge he has always ignored
my request, which sets him aside as the only person in the Internet who
refused this simple courtesy. The EARN Association, representing 100k's
of users, made a similar request in a formal, written letter; same
results. Here is the quote I object to, in addition to the name the
software uses to refer to itself (I understand that Tasos has no control
over what individual sites decide to alias to his daemon):
>LISTSERV is a system that was originally designed by Eric Thomas for
>BITNET nodes (...) This version is a bitnet-flavored UNIX implementation
>(not a port of the original LISTSERV),
Most people expect two implementations of X to be compatible, with the
possible exception of a limited number of OS-specific functions. If I
give you a diskette and tell you it contains a MS-DOS implementation of
emacs, which however is not a port of the original code, you will
probably expect the controls to be the same as the GNU emacs on unix,
except that directories might have backslashes. You certainly don't
expect to find EDIT on the diskette. If you bought EDIT from me, thinking
it was emacs, and liked it, the author of emacs would still have reason
to be angry at me for creating all this confusion. Especially if you then
went around to your friends and showed them "emacs", and they decided to
stick with Notepad instead.
Now let me tell you why this upsets me on a personal level. Like Tasos I
have put enormous amounts of time in this, and because I didn't like the
idea of turning into a marketing shark and had a good job with a
comfortable salary, I provided the software free of charge for years. I
will not bore you with all the unrelated problems that I got as a result
of this naive decision. But one of these problems is that people like
Tasos and you seem to think they have a constitutional right and duty to
make me waste hours every month trying to explain to users that 'unix
listserv' has nothing to do with LISTSERV, and that the reason "my" unix
implementation of LISTSERV is not compatible with the VM implementation
is that they have nothing to do with each other.
Now, if I had started selling LISTSERV when there were enough sites using
it to turn a serious profit, ie in 1987, the trademark would have been
registered since that time. It might conceivably only have made it to the
secondary register, but even in that case, after 5 years without any
challenge from a business using the name for trade, it would have been
upgraded to the primary register. Today, anyone using the name 'unix
listserv' for a list manager without my consent would be in the same
situation as someone selling computers under the brand name 'unix Apple'.
But I wouldn't need to worry about that or even type this message,
because the level of respect for private and corporate property in the US
is such that everyone would find it perfectly normal that only I can use
the name 'listserv' for list managers and only Apple can use the name
'Apple' for personal computers. But since I was naive enough to decide to
make my efforts freely available, I am now in the situation I am in, with
dozens of people claiming I am just a megalomaniac fascist who thinks he
owns the letters that make up the word LISTSERV, and adding this to their
list of punch-card jokes, hehe. Note that the fact that the trademark was
not registered when the product was first released doesn't mean it cannot
be registered now. In fact, it is common practice to register trademarks
in only one country, and use a trademark under common law in all others
until you need to have your rights enforced. I didn't try to register
LISTSERV as a trademark when Tasos started using the name because we're
talking $1-2k if it goes smoothly and lots of talking to individuals
whose company I do not really enjoy, but there is nothing that says you
have to register a trademark initially or never.
Anyway, now things are a lot simpler. LISTSERV has finally become a
product, and every time an organization without a mailing list manager
installs Tasos's software because they thought it was the same as the VM
LISTSERV, this is going to constitute a potential loss of business for
the company that distributes LISTSERV. Sometimes the organization in
question would not be interested in a VM version anyway, so it won't make
much of a difference. And sometimes it will be a corporation with many
IBM mainframes and the loss will be genuine (you can never be sure of
course, but you can make a good estimate). So this is no longer a
personal problem to be dealt with at an emotional level, this is a simple
business problem that has to be handled as such. The company that sells
LISTSERV is not interested in solving the personal problems I may have
with various individuals, however they obviously want to make sure they
don't lose business because the name is being abused (until Tasos started
using it, and to the best of my knowledge, the VM LISTSERV was the only
software that had ever used that name since 1986, and there was NO user
confusion). A typical one-time initial license plus one year of service
for a corporate site is around $10k (per machine running the software).
Now, $10k is not worth getting angry and excited about, but if the
confusion increases and it turns out, in 6-12 months, that $50k is closer
to the mark, it will have become a serious business problem - something
one might want to spend $10-20k to fix, with a good hope of return on
this investment within the next year. The usual way to solve such
problems in the corporate world is to feed a big pile of money to lawyers
to cause them to extract another big pile of money from someone else, and
in this game the only party that ever wins is the lawyers' lobby. It
would be sad and unfortunate, but the logic is inescapable. If you tried
this with Apple, you'd get a polite letter first, then threats, then a
lawyer - and that's if you're lucky enough not to get the lawyer right
away.
The reason I am so pleased with the present setup is that it puts the
moral responsibility out of my hands. Neither party has any interest in
seeing this happen; there is little or nothing the vendor can do to avoid
loss of business due to inaccurate (or at best misleading) claims made by
other people, so the responsibility is entirely in Tasos's hands. He is
free to claim that there is no possibility for misunderstanding because
he doesn't see any, and if that is true there will indeed be no
confusion, hence no loss of business can possibly be reported and there
will be no problem. If on the other hand it turned out that confusion
does exist and the distributor hears of enough (confirmed) cases where
business was actually lost to be willing to flush $20k down the drain to
remove this possibility, Tasos will have noone but himself to blame for
anything that might happen.
Eric
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