ken@gvax.cs.cornell.edu (Ken Birman) (09/24/90)
My message about copyright seems to have scared a few ISIS users who have no software budget at all and are using ISIS in, for example, graduate courses. I've gotten two messages asking about support and one expressing "distress" that we have decided to take the system private. First, we haven't decided to take the system private. We have decided to stop using public research funds to provide support for commercial users of ISIS, which is quite another matter. The cost of providing support has become significant for us and it is unreasonable for our research effort to bear this burden. And, we are really excited about getting to work on ISIS under Mach/Chorus, which are full time jobs. There really is no alternative to handing ISIS off to ISIS, Inc. (I don't know how the GNU people manage it, but we aren't GNU...) Second, we fully intend to support ISIS V2.1 out of Cornell -- we are just hoping that the bulk of V2.1 users will gradually move to the IDS product and that this support obligation won't turn out to be a problem. So, if you report a bug to isis-bugs@cs.cornell.edu, we remain committed to responding rapidly and posting fixes. When enough pile up, we'll probably do a V2.2 release. The main change is that we no longer expect to make major extensions to ISIS V2.1 out of Cornell. My presumption is that this will lead to an increasingly stable and bug-free public release, which will continue to be available in source form. People who switch to the IDS product would presumably do so because of its performance and resource management enhancements, etc -- and the better support structure IDS will have in place to go with these new software products. So, if you are using ISIS in a course and are worried about the public copy going away, please accept my word on this: if you have a problem, we'll continue to be happy to work with you to fix it. Ken