Re: www.adahome.com?...

[John English <je@brighton.ac.uk>]

Ted Dennison wrote:
> If you are suggesting that perhaps he had some dumb software that was
> inadvertantly copyrighting stuff that was clearly inappropriate, that
> documentably false. He did it knowingly and on purpose. This was
> discussed in great detail back when whe participated in c.l.a., and
> several times since.
> 
> If I remember correctly, his rationale for copyrighting the FAQ was
> something along the lines that he wanted to prevent hostile forking of
> the FAQ. However, he also took care to require his permission for just
> about any commercial distribution of it. The LRM copyright seems to just
> have been a crass commercial act (he offers to sell his HTML FAQ on the
> site, and the licensing terms seem to be crafted to prevent you from
> legally acquiring a copy any other way).

Hmm. Having asked Marcus for permission to redistribute the FAQs (and
receiving this without any quibbles), and then having spoken via email
and finally meeting him F2F at Ada Europe some years back, I'm inclined
to be dubious about any implied mercenary motives. Marcus did a valuable
job with Adahome (formerly HBAP) at a time when there was no comparable
web presence for Ada, and I feel that he deserves congratulating for
providing this (as does David for Adapower, which is indeed a worthy
successor to Adahome/HBAP).

Copyright is tricky, and IMHO if one isn't a lawyer it is much safer to
plaster daunting legalese on everything just in case an American gets on
a high horse and sues for an arm and a leg (I like mixing metaphors!).
I plaster thusly myself, and as far as I'm concerned it's a matter of
incanting magic spells (like some of my students incant "with
Ada.Text_IO;
use Ada.Text_IO;" at the start of every compilation unit, just to
placate
the angry gods :-)  I have no real idea what might happen if I failed to
incant such spells, or who might be offended by my incanting them. Oh
well. Anyone got a good compiler for Legalese?? :-)

Despite their age, I still redistribute Marcus's FAQs by permission on
BURKS (http://burks.bton.ac.uk/burks/language/ada/) since I haven't
found
any better replacements yet.

(Suggestions, please?)

Happy new Millenium, BTW...

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