Wapit and the Future of Kannel

Wapit Ltd. has filed for bankruptcy today, and will therefore no longer
be able to maintain its role in the Kannel project.

[  See http://www.wapit.com/news/pressreleases/financing/  ]

We would like to minimize the disruption this causes to the project.
Here's a list of the likely effects.

- There will no longer be a Wapit Kannel team working full-time on
developing Kannel.  Some of us might still work on Kannel in our
spare time, and some might be hired by other companies to work
on Kannel.  Still, expect a significant reduction in manpower in
the short term.

- A number of project services are currently hosted on Wapit machines.
This includes the web site, mailing lists, CVS archive, and the scripts
for daily diffs and daily builds.  These services will have to be hosted
by someone else.

- Wapit holds a number of rights related to Kannel, which will become
part of the bankruptcy estate and will be up for sale:
  * Trademark on the Kannel name and logo
  * Copyright to most of the Kannel source
  * Administrative ownership of the kannel.org domain
    (and kannel.com and kannel.net)
Note that the licenses of already released versions of Kannel can NOT
be retracted, no matter what happens.

- Wapit will not be able to participate in the formation of a Kannel
Foundation.

- The Unicode support that we've been working on will not be published.
It will be part of the bankruptcy estate.

- We might lose the WAP 1.1 certification for Kannel 1.0.2, because of
unpaid bills.

- The agreements for Kannel being in the WAP Refpool were all made between
The Open Group and Wapit, we don't know what will happen to that.  In
any case there will have to be new contact persons.

The legal issues might be a problem.  We won't be able to transfer the
kannel.org domain to anyone because it will probably accompany the
trademark, which will be sold.  (We will NOT have control over who
buys it -- that's up to the bankruptcy estate administrator.)

In the best case:
  * The Kannel-related rights will be bought by a company that is
    sympathetic to the project.
  * This company might participate in the formation of a Kannel Foundation.
  * The project can continue as normal.

In the worst case:
  * The Kannel-related rights will be bought by a company that
    wants to turn it into a proprietary product, and is actively
    opposed to the project.
  * The project can continue, building on already released
    versions of Kannel, but it will be stuck with an inconvenient
    license and may face legal harassment.
  * The project will have to change its name, because of the new
    ownership of the trademark.

In summary, the project will survive even in the worst case, but the
best case is a lot better.  We hope that a company sympathetic to
Kannel will be willing to bid for these rights.

In any case there will probably be an interruption of service while
the legal issues are worked out.  (This could take several weeks,
unfortunately.)

Richard Braakman