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From: taylor@hplabsc.UUCP
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.misc,news.groups,news.software.b
Subject: Public Domain Netnews...
Message-ID: <1312@hplabsc.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 17-Feb-87 14:42:55 EST
Article-I.D.: hplabsc.1312
Posted: Tue Feb 17 14:42:55 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 18-Feb-87 20:30:47 EST
Reply-To: taylor@hplabsc.UUCP (Dave Taylor)
Followup-To: news.software.b
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Labs, Palo Alto, CA
Lines: 45
Xref: utgpu news.admin:152 news.misc:186 news.groups:375 news.software.b:268

While recently perusing the latest version of netnews, 2.11, from
Rick Adams, I noticed that it is now copyrighted by him.  This is
a cause for concern for various reasons, not the least of which is that
we suddenly have a piece of software that everyone is running and is
freely distributed (but not public domain) that is legally owned by
an individual.

So instead I'd like to propose a group of people get together and work
on a replacement for netnews that is explicitly without copyright and
without any limitations on its use and distribution.  If people want
to try to foist a copy off with their own copyright that's okay (of
course it wouldn't be a valid copyright anyway since it had already
been distributed withOUT one).  We will make the public domain version
easily available through various mechanisms including netnews itself.

If it comes to pass that the Rick Adams/backbone-gang version of netnews
begins to cost money to obtain, then I would expect that the public
domain version we'd write would be included on such things as the USENIX
distribution tape and in mod.sources (Rich?).  Even if not, it would be
useful to have yet a different implementation of the software since 
diversity and competition breeds improvement.

Sooo...I'd like to begin building a list of people that are interested in
this "public service to the usenet" project.  If you have a willingness
to contribute positively to the group (either through documentation, 
programming, debugging through actual use, or merely useful feedback)
please drop me a line and I'll start to organize this.  Later on I think
we should create a newsgroup for it...but that'll be a function of how
things work out.

I propose that we call the effort "pd-netnews" and our first version 
be something like version 2.11.  No.  I guess that would be kinda
confusing, eh?  :-)  

It is important for people to realize that this isn't merely a "lets
get back at Rick Adams" game.  I think Rick is a reasonable person and
is an asset to the net.  I just am very *VERY* disturbed by his adding
a copyright to the latest netnews software...it is a harbinger of even
more change...

All responses are being funnelled into news.software.b for now, so if 
you'd like to continue the discussion, please put it there or via email
to me.

			-- Dave Taylor 		(taylor@hplabs.HP.COM)