[Gnotary-devel] GNotary at LinuxWorldExpo Frankfurt

[Sebastian Hilbert]

Hi,

Almost three months since the last message on this list. GNotary has been 
significantly enhanced. GNotary has been present at the LinuxWorldExpo to see 
what response it generates when being presented to a wider audience.

Judging from the numerous conversations we have had during those three days 
there are no obvious design problems in the project. We talked to many people 
and all thought of GNotary as a good idea. There has been some noise 
regarding GNotary's place in the market with strong competitors such as 
TrustCenters and VeriSign. Let's not forget that Gnotary does not try to 
compete with those but has a distinct set of potential customers which is 
excluded from the services of the above companies.

We have been giving out info material as well as mini-CDs containing the 
client software for Linux and Windows. 

As you might know I (Sebastian Hilbert) have founded a company to develop 
GNotary and provide services around it. As a result two new GNotary servers 
have been set up with serve requests by running the new code.

One can be reached at server1.gnotary.de while the other one is 
server2.gnotary.de

Additional services (non free) services are provided via the address 
www.gnotary.de. To make this clear. Gnotary (server and client) are GPL 
licensed as they used to) To at least have a chance to carve a product out of 
GNotary we have developed a Webinterface which caters for the additional 
features. A feature/cost matrix can be seen at www.gnotary.de

We have many ideas how to enhance GNotary. We will do so by licensing parts of 
our new code under the GPL while some parts might initially be offered under 
non-free licenses. Any code that uses GPL-code will automatically be licensed
under the terms of the GPL.

As of now we can say that GNotary does not sell itself. This means a great 
deal of educating the potential customers is involved. This limits my ability 
to publicly announce our next move.

The new code has not yet been checked back into the GNotary CVS tree. I am not 
sure if it is ok to check in code which caters for non-free (as of now) 
features. Maintaining two sets of clients/servers ( both GPL) does not appeal 
to me. If anyone has any doubts about the code we produce we will find a way 
to let you have it like the GPL requires. 

Let me know what you think regarding opening a new branch in cvs and checking 
in the code that provides free and non-free services.

Sebastian Hilbert
-- 
Sebastian Hilbert 
Leipzig / Germany
[www.openmed.org]  -> PGP welcome, HTML ->/dev/null
ICQ: 86 07 67 86   -> No files, no URL's
VoIP: callto://address@hidden
My OS: Suse Linux. Geek by Nature, Linux by Choice