Subject: Re: Licensing constraints...?????
To: William Coldwell <billc@warped.com>
From: Giles Lean <giles@nemeton.com.au>
List: current-users
Date: 08/28/1997 18:43:45
On Thu, 28 Aug 1997 00:45:21 -0700 (PDT)  William Coldwell wrote:

> To the best of my knowledge, this issue has been resolved, and anonymous
> ftp access has been restored.  CTM access has been revoked though, as this
> violates licensing terms of many of the contributors to NetBSD.

It has been *claimed* that a CTM distribution of the NetBSD source
tree violates some of the license terms of files in that tree.

The legal merit of that claim is unclear, however Bill's swift
action to avoid potential legal entanglements and to preserve the
co-operative spirit of NetBSD development is to be commended.

For my part (as the person setting up the embryonic service) the
decision to discontinue it is taken without prejudice, solely as
a gesture of goodwill to the developer* who approached the NetBSD
Core Team about the CTM distribution.

Should the developer approach me about the unofficial service I
have been running for the last 15 months I will most likely suspend
it too, in order to carry on further discussions in a co-operative
atmosphere.

I do not intend to take further part in any public discussion of
this issue, aside from any announcements about variation of the
existing CTM service.

*The name of the developer concerned has not been disclosed to
me by the core team.

Giles