🚀 go-pugleaf

steve@txsil.lonestar.org (Steve McConnel) writes:

>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.

We can just ASK Brian, of course [reid@decwrl.dec.com ought to do, I'd
guess], but the twist on this was that Brian did scribe *as* his
doctoral dissertation project [speaking of self-referential efforts].
It is often the case that schools retain interests in stuff developed
"on their behalf" in exchange for a degree [isn't that the old story
about Land --- he had to *refuse* his degree at Harvard or else _they_
would have claimed ownership or license or some such in his work [I
think that round was his polarizing material]], so things are not
always as clear cut as they seem... in fact, in some ways I'm surprised
that he *did* get CMU to let him retain the rights....

>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.

Partly...  Brian has commented that he got screwed [e.g., when they charged *him*
$8K for the next version or some such...:-)]... but athat was more a matter
that he needed a better lawyer than that he was trampled.  

 /b\