3 ms·

Is he the copyright holder? Being the last employee doesn't have anything to do with copyright, if you're an employee of a company.

skissane 3y ago
The company (Symbolics) was owned by Andrew Topping. Topping died, and Symbolics' IP was sold at his deceased estate auction. It was bought by John C. Mallery, a (former?) MIT professor, so he is the current copyright holder. (Or at least he asserts he is–some have expressed doubts over the legitimacy of the transaction, but the only way to get a definitive answer to that would be through a lawsuit, and nobody thus far has wanted to go down that path–the risks are that one might spend a fortune on lawyers and Mallery could win.) Gary Palter was one of the last employees, and as such doesn't own the copyrights. However, he is in personal contact with Mallery, and the enhancements he has made to Genera (such as porting it to ARM) have been done with Mallery's permission. Nobody seems to understand why Mallery is squatting on this rather than making it publicly available. Palter has never clearly explained it, although I imagine he doesn't want to burn his bridges with Mallery, and that may limit what he's able to publicly say.
- nullc 3y ago
  > Nobody seems to understand why Mallery is squatting on this rather than making it publicly available. Clearly he's hoping John Titor shows up and offers to exchange priceless insights about the future in exchange for access to the code in order to repair some weird embedded system in the far future. :) More seriously, its not uncommon for people to have unrealistic expectations of the value of the things they've collected. They liked them enough to collect them, after all. People seeking them out might help cement the inflated valuation. The sad thing is that when people die the people that inherit the assets often see no value in them at all and lose or discard them.
  - skissane 3y ago
    > More seriously, its not uncommon for people to have unrealistic expectations of the value of the things they've collected. Does anyone know how much Mallery paid at the auction? It makes a big difference whether it was $50 or $50,000 If he paid a significant sum for it, he may still be clinging to hopes of an eventual return on his investment.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - eschaton 3y ago
      Rumor is he presented an unpaid invoice for on the order of $10K to Topping’s estate and got the IP that way. If it’d actually gone to auction I was l prepared to pay quite a bit more.
- BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
  The answer is obviously “money”. An MIT researcher’s legacy will be that he withheld a huge piece of computing history from the world for personal gain. What a stain.
  - marcus0x62 3y ago
    What money? In what alternate universe is a well-heeled investor or commercial entity going to pay a bunch of money for an ancient single-user operating system written in and for a language that, let's be honest, almost nobody uses?
    - BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
      Why would there be a stipulation for non-commercial use if this isn’t about money?
      - marcus0x62 3y ago
        Maybe the owner thinks Genera will become more valuable in the future? My point is I don't see any possibility of that actually happening. I'd imagine there is some revenue for maintenance/bug fixes of existing installations (David Schmidt has apparently been running the hardware maintenance/support side of things for quite some time,) but I don't see how the software does anything other than get less valuable commercially with every passing year.
        BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
        > I don't see how the software does anything other than get less valuable commercially with every passing year That’s the worst part of all this. It’s not like he’s sitting on a goldmine, he’s hoarding something of immense historical value because it’s slightly more beneficial for him to do so than it would be to share it. I can’t imagine steering your legacy from being immortalized as an MIT AI researcher to… that.
    - Zigurd 3y ago
- znpy 3y ago
  Mallery looks like somebody in their 70ies, i guess we'll have to wait for the next deceased estate auction? I know it's not pretty, but it's an option.

skissane 3y ago

The company (Symbolics) was owned by Andrew Topping. Topping died, and Symbolics' IP was sold at his deceased estate auction. It was bought by John C. Mallery, a (former?) MIT professor, so he is the current copyright holder. (Or at least he asserts he is–some have expressed doubts over the legitimacy of the transaction, but the only way to get a definitive answer to that would be through a lawsuit, and nobody thus far has wanted to go down that path–the risks are that one might spend a fortune on lawyers and Mallery could win.) Gary Palter was one of the last employees, and as such doesn't own the copyrights. However, he is in personal contact with Mallery, and the enhancements he has made to Genera (such as porting it to ARM) have been done with Mallery's permission. Nobody seems to understand why Mallery is squatting on this rather than making it publicly available. Palter has never clearly explained it, although I imagine he doesn't want to burn his bridges with Mallery, and that may limit what he's able to publicly say.

nullc 3y ago
> Nobody seems to understand why Mallery is squatting on this rather than making it publicly available. Clearly he's hoping John Titor shows up and offers to exchange priceless insights about the future in exchange for access to the code in order to repair some weird embedded system in the far future. :) More seriously, its not uncommon for people to have unrealistic expectations of the value of the things they've collected. They liked them enough to collect them, after all. People seeking them out might help cement the inflated valuation. The sad thing is that when people die the people that inherit the assets often see no value in them at all and lose or discard them.
- skissane 3y ago
  > More seriously, its not uncommon for people to have unrealistic expectations of the value of the things they've collected. Does anyone know how much Mallery paid at the auction? It makes a big difference whether it was $50 or $50,000 If he paid a significant sum for it, he may still be clinging to hopes of an eventual return on his investment.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - eschaton 3y ago
    Rumor is he presented an unpaid invoice for on the order of $10K to Topping’s estate and got the IP that way. If it’d actually gone to auction I was l prepared to pay quite a bit more.
BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
The answer is obviously “money”. An MIT researcher’s legacy will be that he withheld a huge piece of computing history from the world for personal gain. What a stain.
- marcus0x62 3y ago
  What money? In what alternate universe is a well-heeled investor or commercial entity going to pay a bunch of money for an ancient single-user operating system written in and for a language that, let's be honest, almost nobody uses?
  - BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
    Why would there be a stipulation for non-commercial use if this isn’t about money?
    - marcus0x62 3y ago
      Maybe the owner thinks Genera will become more valuable in the future? My point is I don't see any possibility of that actually happening. I'd imagine there is some revenue for maintenance/bug fixes of existing installations (David Schmidt has apparently been running the hardware maintenance/support side of things for quite some time,) but I don't see how the software does anything other than get less valuable commercially with every passing year.
      - BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
        > I don't see how the software does anything other than get less valuable commercially with every passing year That’s the worst part of all this. It’s not like he’s sitting on a goldmine, he’s hoarding something of immense historical value because it’s slightly more beneficial for him to do so than it would be to share it. I can’t imagine steering your legacy from being immortalized as an MIT AI researcher to… that.
  - Zigurd 3y ago
znpy 3y ago
Mallery looks like somebody in their 70ies, i guess we'll have to wait for the next deceased estate auction? I know it's not pretty, but it's an option.