Re: Sad Day for Ada - Update your links

[Jeff Creem <jcreem@yahoo.com>]

David Trudgett wrote:
> Jeff Creem <jcreem@yahoo.com> writes:
> 
> 
>>Oh well. It was time for my annual (or at least bi-annual) trip to the
>>whois database to watch to see if the ada home dot com domain was
>>going to expire (not written as a URL to avoid giving googlebot more
>>links to the site than it already has).
>>
>>ada home dot com was once a great site for up to date Ada information
>>but about 6 years ago it stopped getting updated at all (other than
>>the automated headline script at the left side of the page that shows
>>the date).
> 
> 
> About six years ago was 1999, the date of this post (apparently) from
> Magnus Kempe, in which he claims to be happy to have a competent
> volunteer maintain his FAQ (why does an individual "own" the FAQ for
> Ada?):
> 

Not sure what came of that but both David and I have tried to contact 
Magnus several times over the past few years about transfer of the 
entire site/domain and he was not interested. I never saw or heard of an 
offer to have someone else maintain the site until that repost (which 
was just for the FAQ as near as I could tell)

And the reason the FAQ is "owned" by a person is it is copyrighted and 
therefore can not be copied to another site.

(See the bottom of the page: This FAQ is Copyright � 1994-1996 by Magnus 
Kempe.) Of course in the US even without an explicit statement it would 
have likely been protected by copyright.

It does have fairly liberal terms for re-distribution but the part that 
says "as long as it is completely unmodified" sort of causes some 
issues. Of course most of the FAQ and answers really originally came 
froom other people so technically the individual items are actually not 
copyright'd by Magnus but by the original authors.

The fun part of his response is where he claims david is mistaken that 
Magnus no longer wants to actively work on the website...but then the 
site is never updated once after that...


In any case, it is (was) of course a volenteer effort and he is under no 
obligation to do anything....so to some extent I was needlessly venting.