amiga-news.de - NSDi on AmiTCP/IP licensing and Genesis rights

08.Dec.2000
Christoph Dietz

NSDi on AmiTCP/IP licensing and Genesis rights
Press release:
NSDi PRESS RELEASE 2000/12/08 22:45 EET, 21:45 CET, 20:45 UTC

The Issue About AmiTCP/IP Licensing and GENESiS Publishing Rights:

Since the World of Amiga (WOA) show begins tomorrow, Saturday, December 9th 2000 and Haage&Parther is expected to start selling their AmigaOS 3.9 and NSDi and Haage&Partner is not yet in agreement of the licensing of the AmiTCP/IP software, NSDi is forced to publish this information:

Happened so far:

AmiTCP/IP was licensed to be part of Amiga GENESiS Networking System with a license fee of $5 per AmiTCP/IP Copy. No later licensing agreement has been done between NSDi (The AmiTCP/IP Copyright Holder) and any AmiTCP/IP licensee.

The latest moment any license payments for NSDi has been made January 1999, with amount of about EUR 4000. 1st quarter of year 2000 AmiTCP/IP source was provided for one of the GENESiS developer so he could add some missing features. At this time, however:

NSDi or respective NSDi personnel has not given any immaterial property rights of AmiTCP/IP software away.
No right for further redistribution of AmiTCP/IP source to anybody.

(both of these has been violated, either by incompetence to follow the copyright laws, or just unwillingity to obey it -- hopefully it is the first case)

At fall 2000, without any prior notice to NSDi, publishing rights of GENESiS has been transferred to Haage&Partner. I (Tomi Ollila) at NSDi was informed this when the press release about 4 weeks after this has happened, was sent to one of the vaporware mailinglists.

At that time, since such a radical change in GENESiS rights I asked our current licensee when our payments are due. I basically got an answer that there is no money since all has gone to publishing cost or lost when the company that made the CD:s went bankcrupty. That is an answer I could live with. I did not want our licensee to get into more trouble, as he had done so hard work with it. I just thought I then ask Haage&Partner that at a later time -- as publishing rights were transferred, all the licensing issues should have come with it. But, I also have an ordinary work -- with EUR 1000 one just cannot manage in modern western country very long -- I have been pretty busy working so I forgot to ask that just then.

Note that that does not lessen our immaterial property rights of the software of ours: It is responsibility of the people who are going to sell the software further the figure out under what copyright the sofware is bound of.

But, at the end of November 2000, I heard that Haage&Partner is going to include GENESiS in their forthcoming AmigaOS 3.9. The genesis package included AmiTCP/IP, and NSDi has had the previously mentioned licensing agreement effective with it. However, NSDi was never contacted of such an arrangement.

I was forced to take a quick action: I sent an e-mail to Haage&Partner explaining the situation using quite strong words just to get attention.

After a few e-mails sent back and forth, I was asked to make an offer with a fixed sum for unlimited use of the AmiTCP/IP software. I come first up with a market price of some TCP/IP stack I've heard, and that was EUR 15000. That was way too much what the Haage&Partner representative say they could handle. Since this was so close to the beginning of WOA and we don't have much time to negotiate (even it is not my fault that I did not know earlyer), I come up with much lesser price in my next e-mail...

I sent that email yesterday morning, about 11 EET (10 CET, 9 UTC), and I have got no answer to that e-mail up to now.

So, now we are in situation, where Haage&Partner does have publishing rights to GENESiS software, but has no license to sell the included AmiTCP/IP. It might be so, that Haage&Partner has been so busy that they have had no time to answer my latest proposition -- that I don't know. Anyway, If they start selling AmigaOS 3.9 with GENESiS and AmiTCP/IP included, they are selling unlicensed software.

At the time being, we are still willing to come with AmiTCP/IP licensing agreement with Haage&Partner and therefore we don't want to forbid sales of AmigaOS 3.9 at WOA -- mainly since there is so many Amiga users who don't want to wait any longer before getting the new Amiga Operating System. Also, taking such a drastic move don't help our efforts to come with a positive end result in discussion with Haage&Partner. However, my unfortunate duty is to declare unlawful to sell products that contains AmiTCP/IP without valid licensing agreement with NSDi on other sales channels.

At the time being, we continue licensing discussions with Haage&Partner to get the lisensing issue in order. We will keep the media informed of the progress of the discussion.

If you have any supportive comments, critisim to throw, or some more information what I should know, please send e-mail to the address shown below.

If there is doubt of the authenticity of this information, this text is also included in my homepage at

http://www.iki.fi/too/amitcp.txt

Tomi Ollila tomi.ollila@tfi.net (*) Network Solutions Development, Inc. Helsinki, Finland

(*) @nsdi.fi -address no longer active due to poorness of the company.

[News message: 08. Dec. 2000, 11:49] [Comments: 0]
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