Forum OpenACS Q&A: Knowledge Management code (Siemens ShareNet) NOT available

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1: Knowledge Management code (Siemens ShareNet) NOT available
Posted by Don Baccus on 07/18/03 06:20 PM
Siemens has contacted us to inform us that, in their opinion, this code was
released in error and is not under the GPL.

They have asked us to inform people who have downloaded it of this fact, and
for us to tell you to delete your copies.

PLEASE DO SO IMMEDIATELY.

We are working with Andreas Albrecht, RedHat and Siemens to clarify the
situation but in the interim we must assume that this is proprietary code.

We've also revoked read permissions on the file in file storage.

Since many in Europe are going on holiday shortly it may take several weeks to
straighten this out, one way or the other.

Thanks, folks.  It is extremely important that EVERYONE respect Siemens rights
to the code and that you comply with their request while we sort things out.

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2: Re: Knowledge Management code (Siemens ShareNet) NOT available (response to 1)
Posted by Kolja Lehmann on 07/20/03 10:31 AM
In case Siemens will not grant us the rights (which is very likely, since they have more money to do long processes than we have), we will have to program this ourselves, if we want to have it, right?
But what if someone thinks, the people that were developing this in the first place use knowledge for that they were not supposed to have because it belongs to Siemens?
When AD released the Java version under the new licence model there were voices saying "don't look at the code, or they might sue you for stealing it".
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3: Re: Knowledge Management package - coding from scratch (response to 2)
Posted by Dirk Gomez on 07/21/03 12:20 PM

Eh, my knowledge belongs to me :) And as long as you don't violate patents, you can redo stuff from scratch as often as you want.

In general it's not smart to look at code whose copyright may conflict with yours (or your intended copyright) and lift ideas directly. That was probably people's main concern back then.

A knowledge management package done from scratch would look very different anyway: it has to be based on the content repository, its TCL could be roughly based on the survey and/or the cms package, and (I hope) it will be developed for Postgres first and then (maybe) ported to Oracle.

Philip Greenspun's Problem Set 4 would provide a good starting point for the philosophy of such a package. Is that still available?

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5: Re: Knowledge Management code (Siemens ShareNet) NOT available (response to 1)
Posted by Timo Hentschel on 07/24/03 11:02 AM
Just to let everyone know: I'm probably beginning very soon to refacture the whole knowledge library, so we will have a library available some time.