From @YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Fri Aug 13 21:03:37 1993 Received: from ELI.CS.YALE.EDU by NEBULA.SYSTEMSZ.CS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Sat, 14 Aug 1993 08:25:19 -0400 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by eli.CS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Sat, 14 Aug 1993 08:25:14 -0400 Message-Id: <199308141225.AA01492@eli.CS.YALE.EDU> Received: from YALEVM.CIS.YALE.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 4477; Sat, 14 Aug 93 08:23:58 EDT Received: from YALEVM.CIS.YALE.EDU (NJE origin LISTSERV@YALEVM) by YALEVM.CIS.YALE.EDU (LMail V1.1d/1.7f) with BSMTP id 1383; Sat, 14 Aug 1993 08:23:57 -0400 Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1993 01:03:37 EDT Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: Re: La Cucaracha (was Re: Quine on perfectives) X-To: ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK X-Cc: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Erik Rauch Status: O X-Status: And almost has the story right. A brief chronology. 1979 I started inactive interest in Loglan. I contributed to the GMR morphology change then in progress because as the only San Diego Loglanist, I was a convenioent wall to bounce ideas off. I tended to renew interest in the language about once a year for just a week or two. 1982-4 A big political dispute started which I at the time was almost unaware of, being that JCB had moved to Florida, and I was moving to DC, and I was inactive at the time. Some echos of a big fight made it into the TLI membership publication LogNet, through the good offices of its editor. But no one not actively involved had any idea what the issues were. Finally in 1984, JCB set up some straw man ultimata to regain control over the organization. Nora Tansky, now my wife, cast a tie-breaking vote to give JCB control over the Board, and a membership vote that JCB but in terms of a "I win or I leave" choice went equally in his favor - no one could conceive of the alternative. Unfortunately everyone else who was doing anything then left. With such a vacuum, JCB called for a new tier of Loglanists to get involved, and I was one, volunteering to use my new computer to edit the punch-card data formatted old dictionary files into a new dictionary. A couple other people had similar major jobs, not much support or communciations with anyone else, and no real experience in the language to back our level of responsibiity. By the end of 1985 I had accomplished very little, but had taken advantage of a visit from one of the other volunteers to DC (for non Loglan reasons) to establish ties, and found that having such ties improved both my morale and productivity. I started making some progress. JCB got sick, and was in hospital for several weeks. I went to visit him in Fl florida in May 86, and in a long weekend, we made some major strides in getting some things done, and several aspects of the project going again. He gave me names of DC area Loglanists to contact and set up a study group/ team of dictionary helpers. Someone else volunteered to restart Lognet which had not been published for a year. JCB was working on a summary of the language known as Notebook 3 which he gave me to review. In June 86 he went to Europe to buy a boat and sail it back to the US. He returned in September. During those 3 months I dug phone numbers of other Loglanists out of old publications and started contacting them, tyring to get some aids to learning the language, and keep the momentum our meeting had started going. One was the new Lognet editor, who suggested that I instead edit Lognet since I was the one with the ideas, and JCB had forgotten to send him an address list to mail out an issue when he put it together anyway. I said no - wasn't what I had volunteered for. But I did have a number for the previous Lognet editor, and he sent me his list of people to receive Lognet, which apparently was actually a TLI master list of addresses, though at that time 18 months out of date. I also contacted Nora at that time, because she had developed what is now LogFlash, a program to teach the vocabulary. Things started to unravel. The 'editor' of Lognet said that he wasn;t going to put out an issue, citing lack of input from anyone but me, and this whole mixup of addresses. ' Meanwhile Nora and I started getting together - she helped teach me Loglan, and I worked with her to bring her program up to date and make it user friendly. I got the idea to set up user SIGs in each locality, like the one I was trying to set up in DC. Finally in JUly 86, I put out a DC SIG newsletter "me la uashintyn loglytuan" Washington Loglan-User. I sent copies to the DC people and about 30 others who I had identoified as being key people in the previous 5 years to try to get them to set up SIGs in their areas on my model. At Labor Day, I put out a second issue, because I had arranged what became the first DC LogFest, and wanted people to come and see what was going on. This was held the week after Labor Day, and among other things, we did a group revirew of the Notebook 3 Draft. I have to say at this point that the political issues of 1982-4 were not in mind at all - I still didn;t even know about them, and that people had dropped out because of them. The general problem seemed rather to be a lack of current materials on the language which seemed to be cont9inually changing underfoot for those who tried to learn it. Then JCB got back and the proverbial shit hit the fan. I sent him 200-odd pages of neat work that I had gotten people to do or done myself, including the LogFlash update, the review of the Notebook Draft, the address list, which I had determined several address corrections due to postal mail bounces, and the gismu list, which Nora and I had anayzed in detail, finding some inconsistencies among three versions of the lsit that JCB said were all current and the same, and finding serious semantic priblems in a few of them (sound familiar - we are still doing this). All JCB was interested in was in the fact that the dictionary work he had 'assined' me wasn;t done. He was offended that I had shown the draft Notebook to anyone without his permission, much less sent back more pages of comments than he had generated in text (it was pretty bad). My publishing anewsletter had been 'fomenting a revolt' because what I ghad written was not unoformly flattering of the situation in TLI ain the previous couple of years, and he accused me of conspiring with various 'enemies' such as Jim Carter that were trying to destroy the project. Finally he said that we shouyld send him LogFlash and he would evaluate whether to add it to theTLI offerings and pay us a royalty. Nora and I had already decided to sitrubute it via Shareware, and told him this, and he said that we could not do so because the Loglan wordlists were thr property of TLI, but that if we signed a statement acknowledging this and agrereing to pay a royalty to TLI for every copy sold, including any copies for non Loglan use of the program, he would 'consider it'. Thence started an argument over whether the words and the language were copyright, whether JCB could claim any rights at all over the software we had devloped based on his assertion that it 'derived from our Loglan work and was therfore by rights TLI's, etc. he negotiated separately with Nora and I over several months, with each of us independently saying no. Meanwhile, I had a business trip to St Louis in Oct 86, and finally met pc. It wa sthen that I finally learned about all the political garbage and hence why JCB was acting so ridiculously paranoid towards me. pc gave me a bunch of material, inclduing some files of political memos to read so I could understand what was going on. This further enraged JCB when he found out - I was building a 'blackmail file' on him, he accused. In Mar 87 I started a Loglan class in DC. I ordered copies of the Loglan dictionary from JCB for each of the people in the class. JCB refused to fill my order until I started cooperating. Meanwhile he 'fired' me from my volunteer position as 'dictionary "formatter" (he had retarcted the 'editor' title earlier), and ordered me to return all Institute materials that I had, and all products of my work so someone else could take over. I told him I would give him what I could, but not destroy my copies as he ordered, and I couldn;t spend a long time digging out everything I had in any case, so I'd give him the highlights. I then put my own copyright notice on everthing >I< had done to imporve the files on my own, to make sure that he couldn't use my work without settling the issues between us. When the class heard that JCB wouldn;t let us have dictioaries, one of them suggested that we just go ahead and make new words up to replace the old ones that would not be copyrighted. This was in April, and started the seeds of Lojban. I proposed to Nora that month, and she moved to DC in May. One weekend in May 4 people in DC got together and set up some phonological and morphologhical ground rules for such a remaking of the prim list, ad things were underway. Meanwhile the 3rd issue of my SIG newsletter was sent out, this time to a larger audience (about 80). I had written it in April, before we had decided to remake the words, then published it in June with a statement of intent to remake the words. At the end of July 87, we had some 200 words remade, and held another LogFest. Among the agenda items was what to do with "Loglan-88", our effort to make a copyright free version of the language. The basic idea of course was to use this as a lever to get JCB to give up his ridiculous copyright claims that could only stifle the community and the language. 18 people attended, including Robert McIvor as JCB's representative. A secret ballot was held to keep pressure of McIvor and others who felt loyal to JCB, and the vote was near unananimous to continue developing the word list, set some conditions for giving up the effort, and adopting the name "Lojban- A Realization of Loglan" ("Lojban" for short). There still was no split - the language was still Loglan with jsut the words changed. But JCB then publish Notebook 3 under a tarde secret agreement and said that no one could release the grammar to us. (Meanwhile Jeff Prothero had done just so with an earlier version of the grammar that he had turned into a Loglan Parser called "Public Domain Loglan Parser" or PLoP.) JCB had a lawyer threaten Jeff with a lawsuit for copyright violation. Jeff countered with some questions, never answered, which included that the grammar was developed initially by Jeff in the early 80s using University of Washington compuetr time and materials on the assumption that it wass not a commercial product, etc. etc. To make a long story short, we started to redevelop a grammar from scratch, using our by then thorough knoeldge of the language, while finsihing the gismu making, which we did accomplish by our end of year deadline. We then announced 'Loglan-88' in 1 january at the Evecon science fiction convention here in DC, as 'Lojban - a Reaklization of Loglan'. We got 50 odd people to express interest and were already 10 times the size of the rump of TLI, which had dropped below 30 people, most of whom were also supporting our effort as well either publicly or privately. I figured that JCB would return from afall and winter of sailing across the Atlantic to a movement that he would have to acknowledge as valid and succesful, and deal with. I put out the 4th issue of my newsletter, the first actually called Ju'i Lobypli which was #4, in February 1988 telling about what we had done, how we hoped that this would force JCB to negotiate, and that it was his problem if he would not do so. A month later I gor a registered letter saying that I was in violation of TLI's trademark on Loglan, and stating a whole bunch of ridiculous conditions to be met if I wanted to avoid being sued. I contacted a trademark lawyer, got Jeff Prothero to combine with me since his threat from JCB had not been resolved either, and this is when the trademark battle started. It is at this point that we started trying to fill out the shell of the language that we had started (a bunch of grammar rules and a list of words ain't a language). Unfortunately, not much progress was made, since legal battles and large amounts of fees sapped my initiative and time. Luckily?! Nora and I had married and I had support when I was laid off in May 88, and went to work full time towin the trademark case, or better - to get JCB to give it up, since we knew we had a zillion holes in his trademark based on those documents I had gotten from pc a year earlier and some others Nora had in her files. JL5 came out a couple of months later, and was the first to acknowledge that apparently the project had been split, and promising to make the public domain language worthy of the name Loglan that we claimed for it by emulating all that was useful in JCB's design, and fixing only whayt was compellingly 'broken' or what we had to change to avoid legal threats (not much, since he had few new threats he could make). I hope that we have succeeded. We still don;t have books, though I've promised them for ages, but we do have the best defined conlang in history, a total volume of paper on the language that exceeds all but a couple of other conlangs, and about 1000 people listed as interested supporters, even though we haven't done any advertising since 1988, when I started missing deadlines (that initial deadline to remake the words by the end of '87 was the only deadline we ever DID make). We won the legal battle, and can and do use Loglan throughout our products so that we can scontinue to reach the audience that got interested back when JCB ran the project, and wrote the SciAm article and Heinlein wrote about Loglan in his fiction. Our language definitions are mostly baselined, thereby filling my promise to those early supporters that were giving up on Loglan because it kept shifting like sand beneath them. TLI still exists, sepnds a lot of money on advertising, has even published a new edition of JCB's Loglan 1, but hasn't gained mcuh real support, partly because the few people who know uch about the langauge can't talk about it to others without getting permission, andin any case, JCB doesn't give out more than a few addresses and requires all other correspondence to go through him and TLI (the exitence of the net has given a little 'out' on this since there are a few TLI supporters who have found each other on the net. But from what I understand, Loglanist List averages 1 message a month while you guys have been flooding my mailbox daily .o'acaise'inai Oh well - this has proven to be a lot more than a brief chrono. Hope those who know the story will forgive me - it seems I have to write this about once a year, maybe as penance for my naivite in beleiving that JCB was rational, would negotiate, and wanted his language to succeed. For Loglan is succeeding, as Lojban, and the international activity we are now seeing on Lojban List dealing with the trickiest innards of the language should make us all proud, not just me. Just for the record: Ken Shan - China (Asia) And, Veijo, Colin Fine (Europe) many (North America) xorxes (South America) Nick (Australia) Chris Handley (now New Zealand, but from South Africa for the bulk of his Loglan career) I just reminded Nick yesterday. One of my first efforts after I started getting active was to update Chuck Barton's Loglan Primer. In it he made a claim that has inspired me since that day. In Loglan (now Lojban) we are succedding in inventing a new language as a large effort in teamwork, possibly the most successful committee effort since the King James Bible. lojbab