The licensing business is touched on in Robert Alberti’s paper, The Rise and Fall of Gopher. He was one of the people who worked on Gopher originally.
Sorry I don’t have a link handy for you.
decision by the University of Minnesota to charge licensing fees for the use of their protocol
I would like to see an elaboration of this part. Wasn’t it always an open standard? If not, when it became an open standard?
How do you even license a protocol if protocols are not subject to copyright? Or were they?
Also, there is no way to access gopher servers from the most popular web browsers without resorting to HTTP. I had Overbite working with Firefox and definitely enjoyed browsing the gopherspace with it, but now you can as well use floodgap.org directly without any plugins since with extension API for TCP connections broken, OverbiteWX simply redirects to it.
First, in the case of gopher servers run by higher education
or non-profit organizations offering information freely
accessible to the Internet, there is no change. No fees.
They just continue to use Gopher like they have always
done. If you fall under this category, please stop
and think about it. Nothing’s changed.
In the case where gopher servers are being used internally
by commercial entities we think a license fee is right.
We don’t know what amount of a fee is reasonable: so YOU
have to tell us and we need to negotiate on a case by case
basis. What is loose change for a large corporation may
be prohibitive for a small business. We’d like some
kind of sliding scale.
The paragraph just above these two did not age well:
Remember when UNIX was given away free?
How many of you are using UNIX now? It is licensed.
Oh well, so it’s about the original Gopher software, not the protocol. The post is misleading then. To be fair I’m surprised to learn that the original software was not open source.
The usenet post reads like a “Killing your product with bad marketing strategy HOWTO”. Not many proprietary software vendors think they are entitled to a sales commission from simply using your software!
Re: “We don’t know what amount of a fee is reasonable: so YOU have to tell us and we need to negotiate on a case by case basis.”
Oh hell no! That’s the same “call us for a quote” stuff all kinds of rip-offs start with. They say they’re doing it for nice reasons. It’s just inherently going to lead to discriminatory pricing for some customers. So, I push for clear, up-front pricing for at least common cases.
Re article. I enjoyed the article. I was confused by Lobsters saying “authored by alynpost” but article said Paul Scott. What’s that mean?
Re article. I enjoyed the article. I was confused by Lobsters saying “authored by alynpost” but article said Paul Scott. What’s that mean?
Paul is my technical writer and also helps us during maintenance windows when we need extra hands. He’s put together most of the high-quality wiki pages we’ve got.
On an unrelated and humorous note, he’s capable of holding a 3U server full of hard drives over his head, which we accidentally learned when removing one and having the rails on one side get stuck. He sat there stoically focusing on his breathing while I scrambled to clear the jam. The plan up to that point was that we’d derack it together, one person to a side.
I asked Paul to write this article and acted as his editor. I didn’t feel it appropriate to not click the authored by tab, as it’s easier to explain it was written by a group than suggest I was only involved as a submitter.
Is that clear as to what happened and does it answer your question?
I thought it might mean a group thing. I figured Id just ask instead of guess. Yeah, that answered it and entertainingly so. He sounds great guy to have around. Thanks.
I like gopher, but the manually-wrapped text aspect of it turned me off. If the client could decide to wrap paragraphs on its own (like HTML) then it’d be perfect.
the client can do that; it’s the default behavior on mosaic. although in general you should wrap your lines to accommodate people whose clients aren’t configured that way.
There’s also a lobste.rs mirror on Gopher: gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/julienxx/Lobste.rs/
The licensing business is touched on in Robert Alberti’s paper, The Rise and Fall of Gopher. He was one of the people who worked on Gopher originally. Sorry I don’t have a link handy for you.
I would like to see an elaboration of this part. Wasn’t it always an open standard? If not, when it became an open standard? How do you even license a protocol if protocols are not subject to copyright? Or were they?
Also, there is no way to access gopher servers from the most popular web browsers without resorting to HTTP. I had Overbite working with Firefox and definitely enjoyed browsing the gopherspace with it, but now you can as well use floodgap.org directly without any plugins since with extension API for TCP connections broken, OverbiteWX simply redirects to it.
Here is an archived email on the matter, from 1993. University of Minnesota Gopher software licensing policy:
The paragraph just above these two did not age well:
Oh well, so it’s about the original Gopher software, not the protocol. The post is misleading then. To be fair I’m surprised to learn that the original software was not open source.
The usenet post reads like a “Killing your product with bad marketing strategy HOWTO”. Not many proprietary software vendors think they are entitled to a sales commission from simply using your software!
I fixed that sentence to refer to the software and not the protocol. Thank you for catching that.
Re: “We don’t know what amount of a fee is reasonable: so YOU have to tell us and we need to negotiate on a case by case basis.”
Oh hell no! That’s the same “call us for a quote” stuff all kinds of rip-offs start with. They say they’re doing it for nice reasons. It’s just inherently going to lead to discriminatory pricing for some customers. So, I push for clear, up-front pricing for at least common cases.
Re article. I enjoyed the article. I was confused by Lobsters saying “authored by alynpost” but article said Paul Scott. What’s that mean?
Paul is my technical writer and also helps us during maintenance windows when we need extra hands. He’s put together most of the high-quality wiki pages we’ve got.
On an unrelated and humorous note, he’s capable of holding a 3U server full of hard drives over his head, which we accidentally learned when removing one and having the rails on one side get stuck. He sat there stoically focusing on his breathing while I scrambled to clear the jam. The plan up to that point was that we’d derack it together, one person to a side.
I asked Paul to write this article and acted as his editor. I didn’t feel it appropriate to not click the authored by tab, as it’s easier to explain it was written by a group than suggest I was only involved as a submitter.
Is that clear as to what happened and does it answer your question?
I thought it might mean a group thing. I figured Id just ask instead of guess. Yeah, that answered it and entertainingly so. He sounds great guy to have around. Thanks.
A hub for getting started with gopher is the “gopher lawn”, which is a hand-made index of many things you can find on Gopher.
I like gopher, but the manually-wrapped text aspect of it turned me off. If the client could decide to wrap paragraphs on its own (like HTML) then it’d be perfect.
the client can do that; it’s the default behavior on mosaic. although in general you should wrap your lines to accommodate people whose clients aren’t configured that way.