
Frank Chadwick Gets Angry
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The following article, which was posted around Sept 1992, doesn't
so much illustrate GDW's policy as it does their state of mind. At
the time, GDW was being sued by TSR over Dangerous Journeys, and so
they had developed a somewhat defensive attitude. Unfortunately,
one TML member, Scott Kellogg, got slightly irked at GDW. As Derek
Wildstar recalls:

   Quite a ways back, Scott posted to the TML an article about
   a computer virus that "took over" starships and made them
   self-aware, thinking machines. His virus was based on the
   Kinunir AI code from Traveller Adventure 1, but was well
   done in an offbeat way.

   Then, a while later, GDW announced the New Era and the Virus.

   Following that announcement, Scott speculated that GDW might
   have "swiped" his idea, and noted that GDW had "accidentally"
   omitted non-GDW credit and/or payment for items they had
   recently published.

Unfortunately, I don't have the Scott's original article, but I do
have Frank's response:

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To: Scott Kellogg
From: Frank Chadwick
Sub: Plagiarism Accusation

I read your recent post on this network. Since it was a public
posting, I am responding as an open letter. Everything you say
about GDW is wrong, and if you ever again say that you, or anyone
else, was "screwed by GDW," you better be ready to prove it in
court, Mister. I am through tolerating this sort of irresponsible,
dishonest bashing of our company's reputation in public.

The original work on the virus was begun by me well over two years
ago, was discussed in its early stages with the people from Digest
Group, and was announced publicly in a seminar at GenCon '91. These
things are matters of public record.

The people at GDW who are responsible for all of the on-going
creative work on Traveller The New Era are myself, Dave Nilsen,
Loren Wiseman, and Lester Smith. None of us have ever read your
story, seen your ship design, or know much of anything about you.
Loren Wiseman was the only one of us who had even heard of you, and
that was only because Loren's job includes reading the TML
conversations, in which I am told you participate quite often.

Chuck Gannon is not a member of the GDW staff. Showing something to
him does not constitute showing it to GDW. Chuck's position
vis-a-vis GDW has been that of an outside artist. There was a
recent problem with Rob Dean not being properly credited in a
product submitted by Chuck Gannon, but this was the result of some
confused communications, not an attempt to steal Rob's work. I
don't believe that Rob feels "screwed" by GDW, but you should ask
him yourself. And before you simply switch your attack and claim
that he was deliberately "screwed" by Chuck, I would think twice.
I have decided not to take action this time on what clearly
constitutes a libel. Chuck may not be inclined to be so generous.

Finally, Traveller, the Imperium, and its history, are the creation
of GDW, and are our intellectual property. Do you really think that
you can unilaterally take over part of this intellectual creation
by writing an unsolicited story, sending it to someone, even one of
us at GDW, and then cry THIEF! if anything remotely similar appear
in the future? You cannot, and the attempt to do so makes YOU the
attempted thief. Traveller, and its future history, are ours. Stop
trying to steal them.

          Frank Chadwick
             President, GDW, Inc.

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I don't recall how this incident eventually resolved itself,
however, two years later, it would stand out in my mind as being
_the_ event which had put GDW on a decidedly net-unfriendly path
(similar to that adopted by TSR during the Summer of '94). In
particular, I feel that Roger Sanger's inability to get GDW's
approval for his "electrozine" project and Nilsen's outline of
GDW's net-unfriendly copyright policy of 1994 can both be traced
back to this incident. Of course, I can't say with any degree of
certainty that there is a causal relationship, however, the
sentiments between these three events do appear to be very much in
tune with one other and serve to illustrate the philosophy under
which GDW was operating in the years during the DJ-suit.

