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