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SteveD:

Letter published in the Beacon on March 3, 2009 totally discredits your comment "The software was developed before being employed by the city. The grant was for equipment, not the idea." See below. It was clearly developed on site at Warwick Fire Department under a grant for software development where the grantee-in-charge RIDOT let the software be developed by the city as a grant match in order to use grant funds buy hardware.

Federal grant regulations required Lt. Dunleavy to come forward at the grant closing and claim ownership. If he did not do that then he released any right to claim ownership because the original grant was for software. The only reason why the city could have used funds from the grant to purchase hardware was that city employees were working on the software component. It does not matter if the employees were punching the time clock when developing the software. They were employees working on a grant and unless they formally claimed ownership at the time they had no rights to the grant inventions. This did not happen.

As you can see from the letter below, other members of the Fire Department were being consulted while on the job during the development of this software. The "idea" of the software would have been quite useless if it were entirely specified before Lt. Dunleavy joined the Warwick Fire Dept. because he would have had no idea what to actually program until he received input from other Warwick Fire Dept members.

Here are the facts according to a fire department dispatcher:

Letter: Beat up for having helped out the city

To the Editor: I read with amazement and disbelief the article titled "Council grills firefighter who designed software for the city," which was printed in The Feb. 24 Beacon. Here we have an employee, who at the time was a newbie on the fire department, who volunteered his services and his time to develop a software program that took the Fire Department out of the 1950s and into the new millennium. Having started his company with a partner, Henrik already had a base to build on. What he did was to take that base, and through asking questions of the people that actually would have to use the software, obtain information that would allow him to mold his program into a user-friendly Fire Department Management System that actually addressed the needs of the Fire Service. Alas, he did not do this on his own. Surely there had to be input from management to put the ball in motion. Had Henrik not volunteered his services, I am sure that I would still be using a word processor to type log sheets and a peg board with numbered colored golf tees to keep track of the in and out of service fire apparatus in the city. How is this so? I have been a dispatcher for the Warwick Fire Department for 28 years. For years we had tried to get a computer assisted dispatch (CAD) system in place in both the dispatch center and for the entire department. The answer was always the same—no funds available. While the Police Department went through system after system, we kept keeping paper records and using carbon paper well into the "new millennium." Absurd? Yes. Alas, we had a one of the new guys say, “Hey, I can work on that.” And work he did. Many a time he was in my building after working a 14-hour night shift asking questions and tweaking the program. Many a time he would show up in shorts and flip flops in the middle of summer, on his time off, and do the same. The final product is something that saves us time and resources in processing emergency calls for service, while storing valuable information that is available at the click of a mouse. And I would have to say that the price was right for the city and its taxpayers—$0.00 paid to Henrik. So for five or more years we had a state of the art user-friendly program that cost us nothing, and now there is a maintenance charge from the new company. One would have to say the city made out very well. The cost of technology is through the roof. Go to any store and buy some software, and bring your Visa card folks. The city needs more men like Lt. Dunleavy. Perhaps one of the reasons Henrik got out of the software business was to concentrate on his Fire Department career. Henrik has achieved the rank of Rescue Lt. and the city and its residents will surely benefit from his training and expertise.

Stephen Creta

Warwick Fire Dispatcher