On Mon, 13 Oct 2003 22:26:22 -0700, "Robin Rowe" <rower@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > The [WilberWorks] website > > seems bought off and of course not much is left to be found on google > > and friends. This is the best link I could find: > > > > http://linux.rice.edu/webmap/appdescriptions/WilberWorks.html > > > > Let's hope one of the folks involved into this can tell us more about > > the goals of WilberWorks and why it didn't work (that well). Perhaps > > there are things we can learn from it... > > WilberWorks was founded by > > http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,10975,00.html I did a quick grep through my own archives, and I found the following message sent by Scott Goehring to this list in January 1998 (in the pre-1.0 days). It describes briefly what WilberWorks was intended to be. As a coincidence, it was a reply to a message that I posted earlier, about using the LGPL instead of GPL for libgimp: From: Scott Goehring <scott@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Subject: Re: [gimp-devel] The Gimp & The GPL Date: Fri, 23 Jan 1998 12:32:31 -0500 [...] Raphael> Well, I wouldn't mind if some derivative of the GIMP was sold Raphael> and supported by a commercial company. It would even be a Raphael> good thing, because more people would then trust the GIMP. WilberWorks plans to sell copies of the Gimp (the fee being for copying and distribution) and to offer support packages (various levels of service for varying fees). This is entirely permissible under the GPL: you can charge for services related to the product, including for making the product conveniently available, but cannot restrict the intellectual properties themselves. [...] A few weeks later, Scott switched his e-mail address to scott@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, although he switched back to his old address in July 1998. When WilberWorks started, Raph Levien was also involved and was putting together the GIMP 1.0 CD to be sold by WilberWorks. If Scott cannot be reached, I suppose that Raph could provide more details about why the company did not fly as expected. The last appearance of Scott was in September 1999. I haven't received any messages from him since then (I was exchanging some e-mails with him because he was the co-proponent of the RFD that I wrote in 1998 for the creation of comp.graphics.apps.gimp). The WilberWorks site and its bug reporting system stopped working in 2000 (January or February?) and the domain name expired a few months later. Once available, the domain was quickly picked up by a porn site, as you can see in this bug report: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=61017 In 2002, the porn site gave up the domain name and it was replaced by the domain parking/search page that you can see now. -Raphaël
