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Domain: stephengoldin.com
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Comments · 8
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Reminds me of this
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Gibson CEO Henry JuszkiewiczRead how Gibson CEO Henry Juszkiewicz fscked over Oberheim and Opcode, two very recognized and respected brands in the music industry. Juszkiewicz's manipulation of the law combined with his takeover tactics are well known in the music industry and Gibson's integrity in high technology is questionable. No one who has ever entered into a partnership with Juszkiewicz has profited and every single one of them have been sued by him.
Stay very far away from this serpent.
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Lessons of Recent HistoryNone of the following links is new, but it's useful to remember how Gibson Guitar Corporation has managed such projects in the past. See the following:
SUMMARY: GIBSON GUITAR CORPORATION vs. D.N. CROWE
http://stephengoldin.com/gibson/summary.htmlREPORTS OF THESE DEATHS ARE GREATLY EXAGGERATED
http://stephengoldin.com/gibson/reports.htmlA SETTLEMENT HAS BEEN REACHED http://stephengoldin.com/gibson/
It is also useful to see how Gibson handled the acquisition of Opcode.
Gibson vs. Opcode
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Monitor/645 4/Somewhere on the Harmony Central website are some sobering remarks on Gibson's rebranding of third-party products as Opcode. I can't find the links at the moment, but the bottom line is that the goodwill associated with Opcode trademark has been squandered; one hopes that the same fate will not befall Gibson's efforts with the Magic platform.
If only they had open-sourced Opcode's software!
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Lessons of Recent HistoryNone of the following links is new, but it's useful to remember how Gibson Guitar Corporation has managed such projects in the past. See the following:
SUMMARY: GIBSON GUITAR CORPORATION vs. D.N. CROWE
http://stephengoldin.com/gibson/summary.htmlREPORTS OF THESE DEATHS ARE GREATLY EXAGGERATED
http://stephengoldin.com/gibson/reports.htmlA SETTLEMENT HAS BEEN REACHED http://stephengoldin.com/gibson/
It is also useful to see how Gibson handled the acquisition of Opcode.
Gibson vs. Opcode
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Monitor/645 4/Somewhere on the Harmony Central website are some sobering remarks on Gibson's rebranding of third-party products as Opcode. I can't find the links at the moment, but the bottom line is that the goodwill associated with Opcode trademark has been squandered; one hopes that the same fate will not befall Gibson's efforts with the Magic platform.
If only they had open-sourced Opcode's software!
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Lessons of Recent HistoryNone of the following links is new, but it's useful to remember how Gibson Guitar Corporation has managed such projects in the past. See the following:
SUMMARY: GIBSON GUITAR CORPORATION vs. D.N. CROWE
http://stephengoldin.com/gibson/summary.htmlREPORTS OF THESE DEATHS ARE GREATLY EXAGGERATED
http://stephengoldin.com/gibson/reports.htmlA SETTLEMENT HAS BEEN REACHED http://stephengoldin.com/gibson/
It is also useful to see how Gibson handled the acquisition of Opcode.
Gibson vs. Opcode
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Monitor/645 4/Somewhere on the Harmony Central website are some sobering remarks on Gibson's rebranding of third-party products as Opcode. I can't find the links at the moment, but the bottom line is that the goodwill associated with Opcode trademark has been squandered; one hopes that the same fate will not befall Gibson's efforts with the Magic platform.
If only they had open-sourced Opcode's software!
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Re:Let's wait and see, it's Gibson after allGibson is run by a pointy-haired technohick CEO named Henry Juszkiewicz. If you read anything about him, read about the Oberheim debacle to get a glimpse on his poor management style and scavenger tactics of extorting IP from technology companies. Every man that has ever entered into a technology partnership with Juszkeiwicz have all been sued by him. Even law firms under retainer for Gibson have been sued by Juszkeiwicz. He openly refuses to pay engineers and programmers more than $25/hour and refuses to offer bonuses/raises yet he brags about retaining the top law firms in town. More info on Gibson here.
Almost everyone in the music industry is well aware of Henry Juszkiewicz's history and do not put any faith in his gee-whiz high tech products. He is quickly becoming the laughingstock of the music business.
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Some history of Gibson's CEOHenry Juszkiewicz, CEO of Gibson, is an acknowledged scum of the industry for destroying Opcode, a popular MIDI sequencer. Juszkiewicz was also instrumental in destroying Oberheim.
In both cases Juszkiewicz sought to wrestle the intellectual property rights at the expense of the owners and the customers. Opcode was acquired by Gibson in the late 90s. They had a flagship product called Vision that had a large established customer base. In the struggle for IP rights Gibson pulled development and support, effectively abandoning their customers. Opcode and Vision have ceased to exist, yet Juszkiewicz is sitting on the IP waiting for it to grow in value which gives you an idea how clueless he is about software.
Oberheim was a well-known respected synthesizer brand that had been acquired by Gibson in the early 90s. Their only product during the Gibson tenure, the OBMx, was a dismal failure in the market. The OBMx was designed by Don Buchla who shares the credit of pioneering the modern voltage controlled synthesizer with Bob Moog. The OBMx prototypes sounded great but Don withdrew his design team before it reached the production stage. It was completed by an inept design team with no experience in synthesizer design. The production models sounded inferior compared to the Buchla-built prototypes, were prone to breaking down, sold poorly, and within a couple of years Gibson pulled all production & support and pretended that the OBMx never even existed. No schematics or service manuals are known to exist and owners are left with no one to fix their broken units, and legal wrangling continues with the firmware coders over IP rights.
Gibson builds very nice guitars, but I seriously question their integrity in anything software or electronics related.
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Total piracy of technology
This is nothing new - originally, Gibson invested in CNMAT, Zeta, and a couple contractors to develop an extension to MIDI called ZIPI. A horrendous name, but functionally it was much better than MIDI could ever be - and it ran over 10Base-T (late 80's, early 90's). There was a huge legal battle over ZIPI, due to some nasty contracts penned by Gibson and their lawyers, and much screwing of the developers of the technology ensued (this is where Henry Juszkiewicz issued his infamous quote "There is no right, there is no wrong. There's only who has more money for the better lawyers.").
After this bout of legal hell was completed, Gibson had their own internal engineers re-work ZIPI to work over 100Base-TX with an increased channel count and such, and named it GMICS (Gimmicks). This didn't catch on, because of the horrendous licensing agreement that companies had to sign to get access to the technical specification.
Now, this goes to MAGIC - the third re-munging of the ZIPI protocol, and essentially the same thing as GMICS, only with a much better licensing scheme. It's still non-optimal, it still can be done MUCH better, and it still has a LONG way to go in order to seriously compete with not only Yamaha's mLAN and the IEEE 61883.6 audio/MIDI protocol for FireWire.
For more info, check this link out:
Details of the accounts between Lynx Crowe (one of the developers of ZIPI) and Gibson.