Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!apple!bionet!agate!ucbvax!ucsd!nosc!humu!pegasus!richard
From: richard@pegasus.com (Richard Foulk)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.sysv386
Subject: Re: posting fixes, license, and the u-area bug
Message-ID: <1991Mar1.155948.23736@pegasus.com>
Date: 1 Mar 91 15:59:48 GMT
References: <1991Feb21.141349.26015@virtech.uucp> <1141@gistdev.gist.com> <1991Feb23.080050.21181@ico.isc.com>
Organization: Pegasus,  Honolulu
Lines: 28

>> Wrong.  ISC can go to AT&T and say "Please give us permission to
>> violate the licensing agreement and post this fix."...
>
>#ifndef reality
>
>Wait...OK, I get it!  Marty should just spend a little of her copious free
>time, or perhaps do it on her lunch hour...just drop by the local AT&T
>office and have a friendly chat, say "By the way, we've got this little
>problem, so would you folks mind if we posted, oh, say a couple hundred Kb
>of the code we license from you?"  I'm sure AT&T won't mind if we say
>"pretty please".

Given the egregiousness of the bug in question it would seem quite
reasonable for someone at ISC to make such an effort.

To assume that AT&T wouldn't allow the public distribution of otherwise
useless binaries or parts of binaries seems a little incredible.  I'm
not convinced that ISC's existing license with AT&T specifically
disallows this, or that they wouldn't allow it after a simple phone
call.

There may be other over-riding reasons why posting fixes to the net is
not workable -- but, please don't try to advance your argument by piling
it high with ridiculous BS like this.

One begins to wonder if ISC's motto isn't something like:

    `Well, it probably can't be done ... and I'm too busy to check'