The ncurses licensing saga
invisible-island.net
invisible-island.net
Not surprising. Eric has gotten away with over-claiming his contributions for decades.
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.
When the agreement was made to pass on the rights to the FSF, there was a clause that stated:
The Foundation promises that all distribution of the Package, or of any work
"based on the Package", that takes place under the control of the Foundation
or its agents or assignees, shall be on terms that explicitly and
perpetually permit anyone possessing a copy of the work to which the terms
apply, and possessing accurate notice of these terms, to redistribute copies
of the work to anyone on the same terms.
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.
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.
"Read this."
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.
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.
The reason it's not useful to you is because you didn't repro the issue but rather loaded it on a bunch of other browsers, so understandably you don't see how painfully obvious the problem is.
Working fine only on large screens is not working fine, even for the HTML4-era standards.
This is on Chrome on iOS.
I'll happily file a bug report. Anyone want to help me do so?