Copyright Issue and General Comments
There seem to be a couple of areas concerning most users:
1. Copyright details
2. Feeling about the sale of CodeGuru
3. The look of the new site
The current copyright wording and comments from EarthWeb are still confusing at best. I suggest EarthWeb remove the current wording entirely and replace it with new wording that eliminates all confusion on code ownership, commercial reuse rights, and other similar legal issues raised in the many comments posted thus far. While a lawyer has to approve it, get someone to write in plain English that is completely clear.
Busines is business and web sites get bought and sold all the time. Most should have no complaint here. The issue is what EarthWeb really intends to do with the site and information contained in it. The current legal wording includes pharases like "Sub-license". This sure sounds like the potential exists for EarthWeb to sell/license the content to others for profit. I don't beleve most expected this when they submitted their code. Re-use is one thing, but re-sale is another. This again raises some legal issues, but it is at best somewhat unsettling. Again EarthWeb needs to clarify this in clear terms.
For example, suppose you submit an article and code on an interesting subject. Does EarthWeb have to get your premission before they have the information published in a national magazine? If they get paid for the magazine submission, are you entitled to any compensation? I think the current wording probably says no to both questions.
Most don't like the green wavy display, and it sounds like this will change. This is probably the easy part.
Ed Dixon
Ok, the site was sold, why not keep the old layout for the time being?
Why do everything at once? As if the storm over going truly commercial alone wouldn't have been enough, you also changed the look.
I still liked the very first look I saw better (some 4 or 5 months ago). But this new one is appaling. The wavy bar and the fixed width of the normal (non article) pages are incredible (in a very negative way). Kill those 2, NOW! If I really need code, I'll still look here, until some replacement has been established, either by a normal looking interface, or by another site...
(if the fixed width really has a reason, I'd like to hear who (what browser??? All those windows developers working on a webTV?) actually had a problem with it. If it is really, really, really an important part of your (ex-?)audiance, have a cookie that serves up a fixed witdh adapted site.)
Re: Details of the acquisition
Wow! Cool! Shows how a good idea with some hard work can really pay off.
A third analysis: An idea for a complete open site. The site can be commercial or non commercial
Sombody has asked me what i would prefer: a commercial site or a non commercial site. Thinking about this i got a new idea which is between a non commercial site (for example a site on a university) and a commercial site (like the actual codeguru which will be a museum). It is possible to make a commercial codeguru like site with a complete open interface. Everything would be open in a form that everybody can install the site on another server and use ALL information for his own purpose and where the sites can freely exchange the information they have. If somebody would alter the site in a way that an export is not possible any more he won't get new articles from the authors and the other sites.
Everything would be open:
1) All incomming code
2) All published code
3) All internal code from the site for managing the site
4) The site itself would be made from several layers with well documented layers:
a) The lowest layer would be a database and a import and export utility. The database can be object oriented or be a simple tree of files.
b) Above it would be a layer which would handle the inner logic of the database
These two layers should be simple. On top of layer b) would be
c) a layer which can manage modules
d) a layer which are the modules and which can only talk to b) and c) and do give us the functionality we need: Get an article and display it in a browser, looking for articles, generating indexes, handling a registration of incomming code, handling the state of a review before the code gets the state published etc.
d) All modules in d) would be open too. All programmers around the world can contribute their modules like all other source code which would be published to this site.
5) The whole site would also be published on two CDs for a very low fee. One cd contains the articles and one cd contains the whole source code of the site. The two cds together can setup a new site.
6) There are no copyright restrictions
The starting site can be commercial but there is no risk for selling this site for millions of dollars simply because everybody can copy the site and restart it at another place. Perhaps the whole site should be designed to be on a lot of servers which do exchange their information.
If one of such sites would become crazy too (like the actual codeguru) there would be no problem to launch the site on another server and do it better by making new modules of level 3d). Then there would be a competition who would do it better.
This way the authors always have the guarantee their published code will be realy public.
Perhaps Zafir can follow up those ideas to gain back the trust of all authors and to start a second very interesting experiment. I think we will have no problems when he and earth web will make more cash with it at the end. He can remain the best of all publishers of our code. But he will has to work on an open interface. With real competition.
Ernst Versteeg
[email protected]
We are beating a dead horse: See the Terms & Conditions
I have just readed the 'Terms & Conditions'. Codeguru is dead.
Ernst Versteeg
[email protected]
Re: Changing look and feel
I think the worry over rights is based on the beginning of your terms & conditions:
"All pages within this Internet site ("Site") are the property of EarthWeb Inc. Permission (which may be revoked at any time) is granted to download the material in this Site without alterations and for private and non-commercial use only so long as the following copyright notice is included: Copyright 1996, 1997, 1998 EarthWeb Inc. All Rights Reserved."
That restriction to 'download the material' could apply to my use of the code posted on a page, which would be disastrous. I understand Earthweb wants to protect the collection of contributions it now owns, but I think it's important to make it perfectly clear that using the code in a compiled form is not restricted at all by Earthweb, and even reasonable reuse of the source itself is allowed (a reference to the codeguru web site would make sense here). Maybe all that's needed is clarifying the difference between the pages themselves and the code content within.
Here are a few of the things I think are creating a fuss during this transition:
This agreement was clearly written by lawyers. Right or wrong, lawyers are not widely liked, trusted, or respected. Translate the agreement to English, and you'll gain a lot more trust from users. The few who actually try to read what's written there now are probably looking for reasons to justify their suspicions.
The agreement is clearly outdated boilerplate text. It's been 1999 for quite a while now, but your required copyright message stops at 1998 (unlike the 'actual' copyright message that appears before it - a sloppy update I suppose). My assumption is that it was written long ago without any consideration for how it would apply to source code.
Finally, earthweb is a big company clearly looking to get bigger. That's potentially a big change for this site. I know little of Earthweb, but assume it hosts a huge assortment of content and developers may not be a significant fraction of your business. Again, a potentially big change. Zafir had nothing like your resources available, but obviously worked his butt off for a long time and had no higher priorities distracting him.
But, if you can spell out that Earthweb makes no restriction on reuse of contributed content (though contributors may provide their own, and include it with the contribution and make full use of our larger than average monitors, I bet things will pipe down quickly.
Still no reply - draw your own conclusions (nt)
Re: A second analysis: Where do we publish our code now? - a suggestion
Where do we publish our new code, our modules, our comments now? We now need a simple way to publish our code in a non commercial way. Zafir may add then links to our code. We always appreciate the work he has done for us. So he can make links from his commercial site to our new free site. If he is friendly we can notify him about our changes.
I suspect that many of us will be very wary of "giving" material to any site from now on. It is quite possible that the fuss will settle down, and we'll all view developer.com as a benign friend. However, even then we would be very much aware that developer.com could easily be sold on again, perhaps to someone who really would look to using our freely-given contributions for their own considerable profit. I think that the best solution would be for us all to retain any code and articles that we create at a server of our own choosing. Any site, commercial or non-commercial, could then link to this code; the better ones would do so after summarising what the code does and possibly even rating it (it could also maintain the "Add Comments" database that would allow suggestions/praise/critism). Developer.com or anyone else could do this--that CodeGuru has recently changed its policy and specifically disallowed such links should provide food for thought about the relative financial value of links versus article/code donation. The kind of scheme outlined about would retain all the benefits of code-sharing for users, but ensure that it would never again be possible to "sell" our code on.
Robin
Re: We are beating a dead horse: See the Terms & Conditions
Hi Ernst,
because you're so worrying about codeguru, can you point me to some articles or posts in the discussion forum here which you wrote?
Martin
Re: We are beating a dead horse: See the Terms & Conditions
look for the word analysis in the title
ernst
