🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <6672@columbia.edu> kearns@cs.columbia.edu writes:
>Does anyone know the facts about Scribe?  
>My recollections, which are shaky at best, say that Brian Reed wrote
>Scribe, only to have it usurped by an evil company.  
>I would like to know the story in greater detail, if anyone recalls it.
>
>-steve

Brian K. Reid wrote Scribe while a CS grad student at Carnegie-Mellon.
(I was a EE grad student at the time, and still have a copy of the second
edition of the Scribe User's Manual, dated 25 July 1979, for Scribe version
2A(400).)  Someone convinced Brian of the commercial potential of the program,
and he sold all commercial rights to a company which I think was formed for
the purpose of selling Scribe and related software.  There was a big hassle
for awhile with C-MU trying to claim ownership and therefore collect all the
profits, but as i recall, the final decision was that, as a grad student,
Brian indeed had the rights to Scribe and could sell the program and collect
the profits if he wished.  Whether it was a *good* thing for Scribe to go
commercial or not is another question, but it certainly wasn't a case of an
Evil Corporation usurping a helpless programmer.

Disclaimer:  my memory certainly isn't perfect, and my perceptions at the time
may not have been totally accurate either.
-- 
Stephen McConnel
Summer Institute of Linguistics  PHONE: 214-709-2418        
7500 W. Camp Wisdom Road          UUCP: ...!{texbell|convex|pollux}!txsil!steve
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