Re: www.adahome.com?...

[Ted Dennison <dennison@telepath.com>]

In article <JZp26.45888$A06.1345888@news1.frmt1.sfba.home.com>,
  tmoran@acm.org wrote:

> >The maintainer of AdaHome was a rather mercenary sort. He slapped a
> >copyright on pretty much anything he touched (including his copy of
> >the LRM!).
>   Sounds more like he had an automated uploader that attached the
> copyright notice.

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).

> Legally, the absence of a copyright notice wouldn't
> give permission to copy either.

True. But he copyrighted stuff that (arguably) he had no right to
copyright. For instance, most of the FAQ entires were harvested directly
off of c.l.a., with notice given to the actual authors after the fact.
The Ada LRM already *has* a copyright, with quite different (and
incompatable) licensing terms. So if he hadn't tried to copyright his
HTML source of it (I say, *tried* because its debatable how valid that
was), then the notice on the LRM copyright page which *does* allow
copying would have been in force.

--
T.E.D.

http://www.telepath.com/~dennison/Ted/TED.html


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