> Date: Thu, 28 Aug 1997 18:43:45 +1000
> From: Giles Lean <giles@nemeton.com.au>
> 
> 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  CTM access has been revoked though, as this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.

I cannot see how CTM can be more of a license-violating method than
any other packaging.  True, CTM mails diffs, and thus the distribution
time scope is a bit extended but it still contains all the information,
starting with a baseline, including all the diffs up to now.  That's
no more violating that TCP sessions ship individual packets with
source without the full license text in each IP packet.  It's just a
packaging at another layer, in my mind.  What about the reget command
in ftp servers, should that be disabled too?

Well, food for thought.  Personally I don't use CTM so I don't care,
but the logical extension to not allow IP packets smaller than full
files worries me a bit.  And then I haven't even started on IP
fragmentation.  Be sure you have paths to the ftp servers with a MTU >
the maximum filesize you fetch...

If this is the law, then we might as well stop using software
altogether.

However I don't think the law mentions anything explicit about output
from diff(1) used as transfer method of full files.  The only
important thing is that you see to get all the pieces in a finite
timeframe, just like you do when ftping, supping or whatever.

Just my $.02

Niklas