Re: www.adahome.com?...

[Marin David Condic <mcondic.nospam@acm.org>]

Ted Dennison wrote:

> We tried to resolve these issues with him personally, but this is the
> position he wants to take. Sure, some high-priced legal help *might* be
> able to free up some of the work. But we are engineers here, not
> laywers. Since no one is out any real money, the best and safest thing
> to do is to just redo the work. As "Larry the Liquidator" said in Other
> People's Money, "Lawyers are like H-bombs; ... using them just fucks
> everything up".

Most of the stuff on that site isn't of much value. The ARM in hypertext
and/or Postscript might have some value - but that's been duplicated
elsewhere. The FAQ is probably of some negligible value, but it can easily be
produced again. The rest is just info that exists in other places now. So
there isn't much point in arguing about copyrights.

I don't know how or why the original author of Adahome put a copyright on all
that stuff. I can't imagine how he expected to make any real money from it.
Obviously, there just isn't enough interest out there in Ada to turn a
hypertext ARM into some kind of cash cow. (Or, for that matter, probably any
other programming language.) I could imagine the copyright acting as some
kind of personal protection - take something from my web site, use it, then
try to sue me for some problem with it and my answer is: "Hey! You *stole* it
from me so how is it you have some right to sue???" Other than that, I just
don't see much value.

A site that isn't being actively maintained rather quickly becomes
irrelevant. Adahome pretty much falls into that category.

MDC
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Marin David Condic - Quadrus Corporation - http://www.quadruscorp.com/
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