Not sure where this should go?

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Kraklaha
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Aug 11, 2020 10:53 am

Not sure where this should go?

Post by Kraklaha »

Honestly, I am unsure of where this post should go. There is not a section for discussion regarding WG.

I read before that the goal to recode the system was due to requiring a VM for a present WG install of WG 3.x . This is not the case. The existing WG 3.x install has no problems being installed on present versions of windows.

Personally, I've been a Sysop for quite a long time. Due to a recent discussion on the MajorMUD facebook group I stepped down. The timeline of WG is fairly well documented until the bank took it back due to a foreclosure on the company that owned the rights to WG. Then we hear that Rick Hadsell picked up the rights from said bank, but I have never seen a legal record of this transaction and nobody that I have known over the years has either. Only a discussion board post about how he did it, but not to share it publicly due to not wanting to draw attention. Most transactions like this I have seen over the years were called something else: Fraud. Now we are being told that this rights that were supposedly procured by Rick have now been transferred to someone else?

I stopped sysoping because for years we have treated WG and MajorMUD as abandonware because it has gone unsupported with no formal service of any kind for so long. At the first notice I saw that someone had the rights to this software, I instantly ceased use and removed any and all files/support for WG as I hosted them in order to do some research and see what was what.

So... Hate to be the legalistic bastard in all this, but I feel this is a fair piece of knowledge/proof that we have a right to see. Especially in this day and age. Someone online text and/or words just aren't enough anymore.

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Duckula
Posts: 359
Joined: Wed Jul 22, 2020 1:19 am

Re: Not sure where this should go?

Post by Duckula »

> I read before that the goal to recode the system was due to requiring a VM
> for a present WG install of WG 3.x . This is not the case. The existing WG
> 3.x install has no problems being installed on present versions of windows.

Yes, WG 3.x will install on some current versions of Windows, but it does have some permission based and/or compatibility problems. There is also the fact that all the interfaces are very much a relic of the era.

> Personally, I've been a Sysop for quite a long time. Due to a recent
> discussion on the MajorMUD facebook group I stepped down. The timeline of
> WG is fairly well documented until the bank took it back due to a
> foreclosure on the company that owned the rights to WG. Then we hear that
> Rick Hadsell picked up the rights from said bank, but I have never seen a
> legal record of this transaction and nobody that I have known over the
> years has either. Only a discussion board post about how he did it, but not
> to share it publicly due to not wanting to draw attention. Most
> transactions like this I have seen over the years were called something
> else: Fraud. Now we are being told that this rights that were supposedly
> procured by Rick have now been transferred to someone else?

I think Rick himself has explained the situation several times and I am not in a position to speak on his behalf (obviously) so there is not much more I can say about that. A lot of the information is on the public record regarding the foreclosure and the Bank's involvement in that.

> I stopped sysoping because for years we have treated WG and MajorMUD as
> abandonware because it has gone unsupported with no formal service of any
> kind for so long. At the first notice I saw that someone had the rights to
> this software, I instantly ceased use and removed any and all files/support
> for WG as I hosted them in order to do some research and see what was what.
>
>
> So... Hate to be the legalistic bastard in all this, but I feel this is a
> fair piece of knowledge/proof that we have a right to see. Especially in
> this day and age. Someone online text and/or words just aren't enough
> anymore.

It's a reasonable question you have raised and I have a few points on it:

1 - Most business related transactions such as a transfer of ownership are covered by Non-Disclosure Agreements which prevent the release of certain information. As I said previously I can't speak on Rick's behalf but I imagine this was the case when he purchased the rights from the Bank. Any subsequent transfers would be subject to the same type of agreement.

2 - You use the term 'right to see' and without wanting to sound abrupt I am not sure that I would agree at this point. Nobody is being asked to purchase anything nor is in fact their anything at this point to purchase. In fact the opposite has occurred in which an announcement was made that those long term sysops and even new sysops would be given free licenses to the existing WG product. Now an argument could be made that how do we know these are not just cracked activation codes? My answer to that would be anyone that feels that they are uncomfortable able receiving such a license is free to not take up the offer.

3 - As you mentioned in this day and age people are right to be skeptical about information on the internet but my take on it is that it needs to be considered in light of the bigger picture. Rick Hadsall has held the rights to this stuff for 15+ years and themajorbbs.com domain, its forums and everything else have been around for a very long time. People have purchased licenses for WG from Rick over those years without any repercussions which is unlikely to have happened if he didn't actually own the rights. Rick has publicly stated that he has now transferred those rights to another party. As part of that a new website and forums have been launched with some announcements about future plans which people are free to either become involved with or not. My point here is that I don't know of any fly-by-night scams that are run over 15+ years.

4 - The conspiracy theories will likely be around forever as even if documents were produced, someone, somewhere will say they have been altered and it is a scam.

I appreciate your question and hope that my response does not come across as being evasive or abrupt because that is not the intention, I am simply saying that there are reasons that some things (such as contractual agreements) may never be made publicly available and that does not automatically indicate that something is a scam.
-- Duckula

// Site admin
// Galacticomm IP owner

Questman
Posts: 160
Joined: Fri Aug 07, 2020 2:12 pm
Location: Raleigh, NC
Contact:

Re: Not sure where this should go?

Post by Questman »

The problem with The Major BBS and Worldgroup has always been some of the shady dealings that some actors within the community have perpetuated. Even with Galacticomm itself was still in existence, some of the third party developers or resellers were often doing suspect deals that really damaged some of the credibility of the whole environment.

The timeline, I thought, was well documented at this point. But I know it's clear as mud, no pun intended, because even some of the developers who worked at Galacticomm Technologies when it ultimately collapsed thought that it was continuing as Netvillage legally.

Ultimately, at a high level --

Mr. Stryker passed in August 1996. At this point, he wasn't involved in the day to day, having passed that to Mr. Brinker. Not long after Stryker's passing, his widow sold the company to a group headed by Peter Berg and Yannick Tessier (of Tessier Technologies / TTI). Berg and Tessier had hopes to revitalize the company by expanding the product base to web video and some back-office products (Actibase being one) based upon the Worldgroup core. The funding would come from an IPO.

Understand that at this point the company was in severe financial crisis. I have copies of e-mails from distraught employees who invested some of their savings into the companies begging Stryker to sell for any amount as far back as 1995, which is when it started to get rough for the company. In 1994, the company was making a million dollars a month in revenue. 12 months later, not so much. So this IPO was critical to the company's survival. On the eve of the offering the company handling the offering screwed up and the offering was pulled and the company failed.

At this point Galacticomm Technologies, as it had been renamed (and made a subsidiary of Galacticomm Inc for the purposes of the IPO), was no longer in the historic offices in Florida, but borrowing space at another facility. They had minority investors, but the top of the chain for liens was a bank known as Capital Bank (then Union Planters Bank, now known as Regions Bank), who provided financing to the company as far back as 1995 but with the entire company being put under lien in February 1996 (signed by Stryker) and reinforced in February 1998 (signed by Berg). When they went under, Union Planters/Regions filed for foreclosure, which was granted in 2002. The ownership of the software rights as general intangibles was evidenced by a statement of change to the UCC when Galacticomm Technologies under Berg/Tessier sold a bunch of add-ons to Metropolis in July 1998. On August 16, 2000 Union Planters sued Galacticomm Technologies, Berg personally, and Tessier personally. The court ordered on September 6, 2000 the collateral under lien to be granted to Union Planters Bank. This case -- 99-06592 in 17th judicial circuit in Broward County, FL (General Civil Division) -- is a matter of public record. The document instructs the clerk to issue a Writ of Possession directing the Sheriff to take possession of the property - including forcibly entering premises to obtain it. The court also reiterated Union Planters' superior interest in the property. The bank obtained a foreclosure sale order from the court on June 20, 2002, and purchased the property on August 20, 2002.

All of the above is public record. You can search for it yourself in Florida's court case systems.

When I discovered this, I contacted Regions Bank. I bought the assets on November 1, 2005 through a Bill of Sale. This bill of sale is NOT in the public record. But feel free to contact Regions Bank - Thomas Abrams, the lead attorney, or Barbara Grattan, special assets officer, to verify that the property was sold to me.

The matter of how the property ended up in Maryland under the name NetVillage is different. During the turmoil of the failure of Galacticomm Technologies, one of the minority investors, who had a relationship with the people providing the temporary office space, instructed some people to grab what they could and load it into a truck, and dumpster the rest. Because it crossed state lines the sheriff couldn't do much about it. But they do not own the property and technically all of their IP, and earnings, belonged to me from 2005 until August 2020. And I still reserve the right to collect those earnings and rights to some of the derivative products, and the new owner of the assets has the rights to much of the derivative products as well.

Hope this helps.
Founder, The Major BBS Restoration Project
Owner, Elwynor Technologies ISV
Former Owner, Galacticomm IP (2005-2020)
Contributor, Galacticomm IP baseline

daniel_spain
Posts: 395
Joined: Sun Aug 09, 2020 2:39 am

Re: Not sure where this should go?

Post by daniel_spain »

Rick... do you not own it anymore? I knew of the new phoenix project but is someone else the owner?
And if so does this affect just the core major bbs/wg ip or all the admins as well?
On another note I am curious....... I am not disputing anything, just my curious little mind wandering.
If you purchased from planters who had an interest, would this mean the other lenders who also had
interests could sell their portions as well? so hypothetically..... could Stryker get a loan from bank a
using the major bbs 6.0 masters as collateral, then 6 months later get a loan from bank b and use
the worldgroup 1.01 master as collateral.... see where im going? could it be possible that other lenders
out there could possibly have the same thought process as planters? now I know this all seems like
it would be impossible to use the same product renamed as collateral in a loan but things were not
as connected electronically back then as they are now. I mean in 1995 we had a serial killer on every
fbi wanted list was riding buses to and from destinations just 3 states away from where he was
being sought. (I know its a morbid analogy) but it was easier to "cheat" in the 90's is all im saying.
So could it be possible Rick owns it from his dealing with planers, but others could as well?
Just a question, a lot to take in.... anyhow..... who owns it now? and what has become of all the addons
you purchased?

daniel_spain
Posts: 395
Joined: Sun Aug 09, 2020 2:39 am

Re: Not sure where this should go?

Post by daniel_spain »

Kraklaha wrote:
> Honestly, I am unsure of where this post should go. There is not a section
> for discussion regarding WG.
>
> I read before that the goal to recode the system was due to requiring a VM
> for a present WG install of WG 3.x . This is not the case. The existing WG
> 3.x install has no problems being installed on present versions of windows.
>
>
> Personally, I've been a Sysop for quite a long time. Due to a recent
> discussion on the MajorMUD facebook group I stepped down. The timeline of
> WG is fairly well documented until the bank took it back due to a
> foreclosure on the company that owned the rights to WG. Then we hear that
> Rick Hadsell picked up the rights from said bank, but I have never seen a
> legal record of this transaction and nobody that I have known over the
> years has either. Only a discussion board post about how he did it, but not
> to share it publicly due to not wanting to draw attention. Most
> transactions like this I have seen over the years were called something
> else: Fraud. Now we are being told that this rights that were supposedly
> procured by Rick have now been transferred to someone else?
>
> I stopped sysoping because for years we have treated WG and MajorMUD as
> abandonware because it has gone unsupported with no formal service of any
> kind for so long. At the first notice I saw that someone had the rights to
> this software, I instantly ceased use and removed any and all files/support
> for WG as I hosted them in order to do some research and see what was what.
>
>
> So... Hate to be the legalistic bastard in all this, but I feel this is a
> fair piece of knowledge/proof that we have a right to see. Especially in
> this day and age. Someone online text and/or words just aren't enough
> anymore.

realistic arguments, but in reality, does it really matter who owns it? I just develop on the platform
and enjoy doing it. you mention majormud but metro cannot even spell majormud anymore much
less care about you running a game. And here They are giving away licenses for free.
Now me, I have worked with both Rick, Netvillage, and Worldgroupware. Developing QOL
changes to much needed addons and yeah I took heat for it in the major bbs restoration
project Facebook page by its admin. But this stuff needs to be changed and from what I see
this new project aims to do what I have already been doing for years so I see the good in it.
And its not like net village and rick are bickering over anything hell if anything they are both
north and south..... NV focuses on the non hobbyists and Rick focuses on the hobbyists.
me I just do systems design, modification, and games! I've ported well over 40 games and
am in the proccess of doing a re-release of Galactic Empire, and Trade Wars 2001 and once
we and Rick get on the same page I got some GREAT tele-arena things I can drop. And as a majormud
fan, ever wanna work on a majormjud project drop me an inbox I been wanting to redo MMUD for years.

I have my own forum community with respect to this community only because of the heat I took on the Facebook
group but as I get into a new relationship with Duck here I will gladly move boards over for the better of the software.
My goal has always been and will always remain to be bettering this software platform. Im not an ego-maniacal gotta be the leader type of person, I love collaboration and I just love working on wg. Ask any of my own community members and other sysops
whom I have written stuff for for free and helped many a sysop get a system running. I even helped Game-master bbs get back online with TA97 and they are direct competitors to me in regards to custom TA games. So if you wanna come back and get something going lemme know.

Questman
Posts: 160
Joined: Fri Aug 07, 2020 2:12 pm
Location: Raleigh, NC
Contact:

Re: Not sure where this should go?

Post by Questman »

daniel_spain wrote:
> Rick... do you not own it anymore? I knew of the new phoenix project but is someone else the owner?
> And if so does this affect just the core major bbs/wg ip or all the admins as well?
> On another note I am curious....... I am not disputing anything, just my curious little mind wandering.
> If you purchased from planters who had an interest, would this mean the other lenders who also had
> interests could sell their portions as well? so hypothetically..... could Stryker get a loan from bank a
> using the major bbs 6.0 masters as collateral, then 6 months later get a loan from bank b and use
> the worldgroup 1.01 master as collateral.... see where im going? could it be possible that other lenders
> out there could possibly have the same thought process as planters? now I know this all seems like
> it would be impossible to use the same product renamed as collateral in a loan but things were not
> as connected electronically back then as they are now. I mean in 1995 we had a serial killer on every
> fbi wanted list was riding buses to and from destinations just 3 states away from where he was
> being sought. (I know its a morbid analogy) but it was easier to "cheat" in the 90's is all im saying.
> So could it be possible Rick owns it from his dealing with planers, but others could as well?
> Just a question, a lot to take in.... anyhow..... who owns it now? and what has become of all the addons
> you purchased?

Hi Dan,

No, thankfully, the liens do not work that way. The liens are not on the products by name; they were literally leveraging the entirety of the company - all assets, tangible and intangible, wherever situated, currently owned or thereafter acquired.

There certainly were other investors who loaned the company money, but their loans and their interest was subordinate to this primary and all-encompassing lien. This was confirmed in several court filings and cases. For example, when Galacticomm Technologies chose to sell some individual modules to Metropolis Gameport, the bank holding the lien had to approve it and specifically file that they were releasing their lien rights to these modules. When the foreclosure was approved, the court indicated that the company couldn't give any of the assets to anyone else and instructed the sheriff to go get it.

So, no, not possible, thankfully.

The addons stayed with me.
Founder, The Major BBS Restoration Project
Owner, Elwynor Technologies ISV
Former Owner, Galacticomm IP (2005-2020)
Contributor, Galacticomm IP baseline

Kraklaha
Posts: 3
Joined: Tue Aug 11, 2020 10:53 am

Re: Not sure where this should go?

Post by Kraklaha »

Yeah, Back in the mid 2000's, there were several coders that were making huge claims about what they did and did not contribute to and what rights they did or did not have. There was a lot of confusion around. I think at the time I was playing still on exec.tscnet.com with a lot of others from seattle. Around the 2004/2005 era of ForumsHQ is really when much of that was happening and people were passing around copies of things because nobody had any idea who owned what, they just knew that nobody could be contacted for sales or support of any kind. For years Necro and I were trying to track ---- down and preserve whatever we could which even involved me going through a dank old storage room once to try to recover some old hard drives with tons of doors/IGMs on them from back during CONNECTions BBS days. Control arms ended up being bad and couldn't be replaced, but was definitely worth the effort if they were recoverable.

I've been in sales quite a long time, and it's common practice for people in the industry to make whatever claims they can for whatever they can and then just dare others to prove them wrong. I don't always like taking the ---- role with things, but I've learned to trust less what people say and more what the actions actually happening are. I'm not trying to be a ''stick in the mud" pun intended - But just putting it out there because i know it's on the back of people's minds

As far as Duckula's comment about an NDA - Your assertion is stupid. No NDA is going to block your right to prove you have a right to derive income from a thing. If the wording in it did, I have no doubt that a court would see no problem over-riding that facet of the NDA.

The Comment about Windows install - I have installed WG 3.30 on Windows OS ranging from XP all the way through 2019 datacenter on desktops, laptops, clouds etc. Never once had any kind of issue like you are describing with compatibility or permissions. The btrieve system is completely archaic and I would love to have a system that could handle a much higher load to be honest.

If I could say that I want anything present day from WG, it would be the ability to load maybe 6 majormud realms and every possible door game with fully loaded IGMs I could locate. I would desire to integrate an active web browser login that has the ability to access said BBS. I would like an android AP that has the ability to interface as well. But again, that's just me dreaming :) (The android ap is probably the easiest part of that puzzle)

User avatar
Duckula
Posts: 359
Joined: Wed Jul 22, 2020 1:19 am

Re: Not sure where this should go?

Post by Duckula »

Thanks for your input. We can disagree to disagree about NDA's and their implications, particularly when there is no income being derived.

Yes, WG3 will install on most recent OSes as you say, however the installer alone is old, manual registry changes are required to perform at it's best and does not play well with current OS security. The installer is just an example of one aspect that needs modernizing.

Agree about Btrieve, although for it's day it performed very well. We will look at all the options as to any changes in that area.

Long term the goal would be to have an modern API allowing platform independent access.
-- Duckula

// Site admin
// Galacticomm IP owner

Questman
Posts: 160
Joined: Fri Aug 07, 2020 2:12 pm
Location: Raleigh, NC
Contact:

Re: Not sure where this should go?

Post by Questman »

One thing - if you still have those old bad hard drives, they're not unrecoverable. Bad control arms are common. Usually the media - the disk platters - are just fine and can be transferred to a new platter in a clean room by a recovery company. Still have them ?
Founder, The Major BBS Restoration Project
Owner, Elwynor Technologies ISV
Former Owner, Galacticomm IP (2005-2020)
Contributor, Galacticomm IP baseline

daniel_spain
Posts: 395
Joined: Sun Aug 09, 2020 2:39 am

Re: Not sure where this should go?

Post by daniel_spain »

Questman wrote:
> One thing - if you still have those old bad hard drives, they're not
> unrecoverable. Bad control arms are common. Usually the media - the disk
> platters - are just fine and can be transferred to a new platter in a clean
> room by a recovery company. Still have them ?

i have a lost harddirve and if i told you what was on it you would $%^&.
The Major BBS 6.00 MASTER and when i say master i mean the harddrive from
a galacticomm office developer machine.
It had anything you could think of from server, libraries, games, gsbl, bbsbtr, all of it.
Even had some gems in there like quest for zen and some other stuff you dont see anywhere.
That HD is fine i just cannot find it. go figure right. i have one other that needs something
like you said. it will read but only "breaks" when you try to move/copy

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