That's right, I forgot that Lew is now at Boeing. I keep thinking of
him as just being retired form wine.com. I knew Lew from way
back when he was "just" a division manager at HP. I'll bring it up
with John Toole and discuss the best way to proceed on this.
Thanks for the reminder! (01)
At 01:44 PM 2/11/2005, Peter Yim wrote:
>Philip Gust wrote Fri, 11 Feb 2005 10:42:08 -0800:
>>At 08:59 AM 2/11/2005, Jonathan Cheyer wrote:
>>
>>>[Jonathan] Our primary need is to get Boeing (through
>>>Tymshare/McDonnell-Douglas) to agree to release NLS/Augment to public
>>>domain. I think the best way to do that is for the CHM to appeal to
>>>Boeing that it should be released for historical, educational, and
>>>inspirational purposes. Because I expect it may take many months for us
>>>to actually get to the point of receiving a written statement from
>>>Boeing, we should start this process as soon as possible. I can't
>>>overstate the importance of having NLS/Augment released into the public
>>>domain. We can work on the technical aspects in parallel, but if we
>>>aren't able to obtain the statement of release from Boeing, this project
>>>will not be able to continue.
>>>
>>>Rather than just approaching Boeing Legal directly, who are likely to
>>>turn down our request, I think speaking with someone much higher up at
>>>Boeing is the way to go. When I spoke with John Toole, he said he would
>>>be able to help out in this area. I believe he knows someone at Boeing,
>>>and I think if we can get a favor from them then they can help push
>>>Boeing Legal to write up a public domain release document of some kind.
>>>If they can't find the code anywhere at Boeing, it would be fine if they
>>>would just agree in writing to release their ownership of whichever
>>>version of the NLS/Augment system code that we find on Doug's computer.
>>
>>[Phil] I agree with the priority of clarifying the legal status and
>>getting Boeing to agree to as
>>few restrictions as we can get. Working through people like John at CHM
>>sounds like
>>the right approach to me, too. We should ask John to poke around and
>>find out whether
>>someone associated with the museum has a close personal relationship with
>>a very
>>senior Boeing executive, and ask that person to make the initial call.
>>Those kind of
>>personal contacts are golden. Until we can clarify the status, we'll
>>have to treat the
>>NLS/Augment software as what's called a "dark archive", with access
>>limited only to
>>those working on the preservation project. There are several other
>>pieces of software
>>with that status at the museum, including the source code to MacPaint.
>
>[ppy] we actually did have a conversation about that with John Toole
>during Doug's party. John has exactly the right connection get this
>started -- he's Lew Platt, ex-HP chief honcho (who is now Chairman of
>Boeing.) I guess what you need to do, Phil, is to bring this up at your
>CHM meeting, and request for John to set this in motion.
>
>Cheers. -ppy
>-- (02)
Philip Gust
Nouveau Systems, Inc. (03)
phone: +1 650 961-7992
fax: +1 508 526-8142 (04)
mailto: gust@NouveauSystems.com (05)
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