Proposal: "Legacy" Open Products Partition

From: Hotze <photze_at_batelco.com.bh>
Date: Thu May 7 12:59:00 1998

OK.. this is very quick, but basically, I want to outline the following
points for making a way for old, no longer profitable hardware/software to
make it available:
Reasons To Change
1) Public relations. People who think that you're giving away info on
products that your company made will have a profound effect on anyone
involved.
2) No longer responsible for the information. You don't have to archive old
data anymore, meaning that you can make information lean and clean. Support
for old products can come from those who now hold the information.
3) Recieve credit for work. You (the company giving information) will get
credit for your work, meaning that if someone thinks that Product A Rev. 1.x
has innovation, then Product B 8.x will, too. Also, it means that you
significantly increase your user base without costly advertising/marketing
campaigns.
    Now, here's what I propose needs to happen to get this done:
1) Liscense agreement. This would be similiar to the GPL (in the fact that
it's free, but does not bar anyone from profiting by information.)
2) Central orginazation. Something like GNU, but less proffesional. It
would contain all archives collected, as well as user-made enhancements,
notes or other docs. (For example: Getting a ST 251 to work under
Linux/Windows) Then for support, tech. support reps. could reffer ceretain
products to the orginiaztion and not waste any more time. This would prove
to save companies time and money, especially if it saves training.
3) Petition would need to be made of lots of people (Founding members)
willing to support this idea, weather through time, money, or just a name
giving support.
    For the liscense agreement, we need to be as flexible as possible to get
as much information as possible. So we'd have levels, where any information
could be used for commercial purposes (building new drives based on
information), where it could be used for referance (for instance fixing a
drive), or for "small" commercial purposes. (For example, Fredrick's XT
Part Shop could build new Seagate MFM drives/re-sell modified copies of
PC-DOS 1.x, whereas Maxtor couldn't.)
    So, this is just a basic list, and I want it to get improved, then when
we're sure we know what we want, finilize it, legalize it, put it on the
web, and propose to hardware/software manufactuers.
    Just my 0.02 (with interests, no doubt.)

Tim D. Hotze
Received on Thu May 07 1998 - 12:59:00 BST