
The ncurses licensing saga - Somasis
http://invisible-island.net/ncurses/ncurses-license.html
======
gonzo
> In either case (whoever was the programmer), it was plagiarism. The manpage
> was written by Eric Raymond.

Not surprising. Eric has gotten away with over-claiming his contributions for
decades.

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Aloha
What an interesting (and long) history of how software with mixed licensing is
brought together. Copyright is complicated in software, when your contribution
might be 15 lines that's really really important - or not.

~~~
hollerith
>What an interesting (and long) history

Although I care about open-source licenses and about ncurses, I couldn't get
interested in OP because the author failed to explain why anyone should care
about the long string of facts. Why did the author write it? Was one of the
reasons to publicize misbehavior by one of his 'dramatis personae'? I can't
tell.

~~~
mikekchar
They don't say it very clearly, but my interpretation of the document is that
the author feels that the development of ncurses is misattributed/plagerised
and wishes to use that as a basis for challenging the license. To what end, I
have no idea.

According to the copyright on the document, the author started writing it
about 15 years after the major events took place (and it is now 20 years
later). My question is not so much why they wrote this, but why they waited 15
years to write this.

~~~
toyg
_> why they waited 15 years to write this._

Probably because describing those facts is now a matter of historical research
rather than a political statement. The future of the ncurses project is now
guaranteed, there is nothing to risk (nor to gain) from reopening such old
wounds looking for historical truth.

Note also that the copyright notice at the top of the page seems to imply this
text was originally published in 2011 and then updated during the following 4
years.

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jfb
NEWSFLASH: ESR is a tool.

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LeoPanthera
This page is unreadable on iPhone Safari.

~~~
dalke
Works just fine with ELinks 0.11.7 and it validates as HTML 4.01 Strict. Have
you filed a bug report with your vendor?

~~~
fleitz
There are many valid HTML 4.01 Strict pages that are unreadable.

For instance if you use white text with a white background while it may be a
valid HTML document, it's not particularly useful for being able to read the
information contained.

Even on Chrome the page is difficult to navigate.

~~~
dalke
Indeed, you are right that presentation and styles can be a problem. That
said, the three browsers I used - FF/Mac, Safari/Mac, and ELinks/FreeBSD have
no issues rendering it. Nor is the the stylesheet necessary as the page is
readable with a disabled stylesheet on Safari/Mac and FF/Mac.

In the larger sense, a comment that a given page doesn't work for a given
platform is about as useful as my pointing out that it does work for my
platform.

~~~
icebraining
It doesn't really work fine in FF either; if you reduce the window size, and
you want to side-scroll to read the fixed width parts, it'll scroll "over" the
content, just like on iOS Safari.

Working fine only on large screens is not working fine, even for the HTML4-era
standards.

~~~
nitrogen
FWIW the Android browser also fails; the content and sidebar become overlaid
when zooming in to read the text.

