FEAR20010825

Yesterday I ran into a problem. Maybe you can help. There is a legal danger to the free availability of the Askemos project.

Not because I did anything wrong. The Askemos is clearly mine and the implementation (versions 0.6 and up) are available at the web site http://www.askemos.org/ since 23rd Dec 2000 (my 35th birthday). But...

There is a customer, who uses an application build on top of fiXml, the commercially licensed version of Askemos. Their business policy carefully drives their partners into strange dependencies. Saving you the details for now, the only possible decition was to stop their application from working.

Unfortunately the other company has perfect support from both a good lawyer and a local politician. We feel the danger that they could get a temporary court ruling. Even though they have clearly no chance to get a final ruling, a temporary one could easily stand for 2 or 3 years until the final one is found.

Please obtain a copy of the distribution tarball http://www.askemos.org/askemos.tar.gz under the GPL for safekeeping. Just in case. If I can't do it, someone has to distribute it. I don't think that they will open an international court case. And if they do, it will take some time until the get it done. Maybe we have a final ruling until than. Even better would be, if we could arrange a mirror site, after all my machine can break. In any case, please drop mailto:Joerg.Wittenberger@pobox.com a note, how to reach you in the worst case.