[ntp:hackers] Copyright notice

David L. Mills mills at udel.edu
Tue Jun 24 15:13:41 UTC 2008


Heiko,

Huh? The notice is intended to avoid somebody downloading the 
distribution and claiming it as their own and not derivative. The notice 
says nothing about the file, only the notice itself. It is perfectly 
satisfacory to snip the unformatted ASCII portion and paste it into some 
other document.

All the html pages are carefully designed to be read without gross pain 
on an ordinary text editor. There is nothing anywhere dependent on Lynx 
or any particular browser, just that it be capable of vanilla html.

Everybody knows my evil policies on copyright wording and documenation 
style. What you see is what you get and I have no plans to change either.

Dave

Heiko Gerstung wrote:

> David L. Mills schrieb:
>
>> Folks,
>>
>> Lots of folks have been chipping away at me over the years about the 
>> copyright notice in the NTP distribution. I have refused to change 
>> the wording on the basis this might disenfranchise current users. 
>> Well, I took the case to the lawyers in our Univerisity Intellectual 
>> Properties Office and they told me the current wording is perfect and 
>> not to change anything. They did suggest I change the copyright 
>> holder to the University of Delaware on the basis this might deflect 
>> complaints to me personally. I have done that and so it remains.
>>
>> Dave 
>
>
> Dave,
>
> on a sidenote: Do you still think it is necessary to download that 
> copyright notice when I try to build ntp from sources? This requires 
> lynx and I think it is pretty unnecessary to insist on a specific web 
> browser just to build something from source. It would probably be a 
> good idea to ask the UDel lawyers if the file could be included in a 
> static version which has a phrase like "If a newer version of this 
> document is available at www.ntp.org/copyright.html, that one is 
> valid" or something like this.
>
> If we cannot avoid the dynamic downloading of a legal document, I 
> would vote for at least allowing alternatives to lynx (like wget, 
> links, links2, ...).
>
> Best Regards,
>  Heiko
>



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