Although a party to this, I can underline it from
another point of view. I will change the name in
this story, just in case it in turn seems insensitive to
the proprietary rights of a third party.
I once wrote a Stata program I will call -foostat-. The
whole thing was something that could be printed on
two pages or so. It was not a big deal, but it
did what it claimed.
I was then contacted by the author of a commercial program
called Foostat, pointing out that his program name
preceded mine, and so on and so forth. He was
very polite about it and did not even mention
the word "lawyer".
My initial reaction was to think that he should not be ridiculous:
who could seriously get confused between my little
program, which was freely available on the internet,
and his shrink-wrapped executable, which did much more?
But there was a simple inequality. He cared much more
about his program name than I cared about mine -- indeed
it appeared to be his business --
and it was a few minutes' work to edit my .ado and .hlp
and make the conflict a matter of history.
This was a few years back and I see that Foostat
is still there. So is my newer -foobarstat-,
although it is not called that, and it is even
less of a big deal than it was.
When I mentioned this to various U.S. friends,
several asked "And what did your lawyers say?".
They seemed quite surprised that I had not thought
of consulting any.
Nick
[email protected]
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected]
> [mailto:[email protected]]On Behalf Of
> William Gould,
> Stata
> Sent: 24 October 2006 16:38
> To: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: st: JMP: Figure 7 In JMP(93)
>
>
> There has recently be a thread discussing -jmp-, a module for
> Stata written by
> Ben Jann to perform Juhn-Murphy-Pierce decomposition.
>
> Nick Cox <[email protected]> jumped to the mistaken
> conclusion that the
> dicussion was about JMP, statistical software by SAS. I did
> too, and I
> bet I'm not the only one.
>
> The possibility for confusion is so great that I think Ben
> should rename
> -jmp-. I know we at StataCorp would be irritated if there
> was a SAS program
> -- even if user written -- called STATA. SAS deserves the
> same consideration.
>
> I suggest Ben rename -jmp- to be -jmpierce- and then, if he
> is wedded to the
> -jmp- name, let -jmp- be an abbreviation for -jmpierce-. Or Ben could
> find another name that appeals to him.
>
>
> -- Bill
> [email protected]
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