gil@limbic.UUCP (Gil Kloepfer Jr.) (07/18/88)
In article <431@icus.UUCP> lenny@icus.UUCP (Lenny Tropiano) writes: |>In article <112@pbhacker.UUCP> tlh@pbhacker.UUCP (Lee Hounshell) writes: |>|>I've had a few requests for a repost of the fixed version of phdaemon.. |>|>for those of you not familiar with it, phdaemon will monitor both |>|>incoming and outgoing calls on your Unix PC. |>|> |> |>Some phdaemon history... |> |>The phdaemon everyone is familiar with was probably the version I wrote. [Remainder of Lenny's description deleted] |>Note this was a total rewrite... I did give credit to Paul and Mike in |>my comment section which was somehow changed (for what reason) by |>Lee Hounshell. I would appreciate if the header information was left |>in tact, and you just added your revision history and your comments where |>appropriate. [I thought this was somehow understood when people add to |>someone else's programs] Note that this is NOT an attack on other people "hacking" people's posted programs. When I saw the source posting that Lenny refers to, I called him and asked him, "what gives?" I looked at both programs side by side and could see that most of the changes to phdaemon that Lee made were in modifying some coding style (why, I don't know), removing some code he thought did not make any sense, and adding code which handled the "new" error trapping. Why Lee changed the header to this program is beyond my comprehension. There are two things (specifically) which bother me: 1. As Lenny made reference to, the program's revision history had been totally modified to such an extent that nobody in the future could send context diffs to a central site and get the latest version of the program. 2. The organization to which Lenny belongs had been omitted from the header. Why do people post their source code to the net, rather than binaries? So that people can learn from other people's work, and so that the author can learn from the net.community when context diffs are returned and a new version of the program is released. This doesn't mean that if Lee decided to rewrite the whole thing, that he should stick Lenny's name in boldface type at the top of the program, but as long as the majority of the program is Lenny's, then the header should have remained in-tact with a note as to the revision history of the program being modified. Even more properly, Lee should have followed-up to Lenny in another letter (supposing the original one got lost in the "mail") with a set of context diffs so that Lenny could release a new version. There is no reason why each of use MUST stick a disclaimer and copyright notice at the bottom of each of our headers stating that the program can be copied and hacked but the header should remain in the program. Further, the organization which someone represents should always remain attached to the person's name since, in many cases, the organization helped by providing the resources which made the program possible. Again, recognition should go to the author and his organization when a majority of a program is used for a particular purpose. I would appreciate some input on how future public domain software posted to the net should be maintained (especially as to "ownership" of code, what is proper as far as changing headings (,etc), who should handle maintenance of the code, and so on). Please send mail to me directly and I will post a followup article in about 2 weeks summarizing the responses. +------------------------------------+----------------------------------------+ | Gil Kloepfer, Jr. | Net-Address: | | ICUS Software Systems | {boulder,talcott}!icus!limbic!gil | | P.O. Box 1 | Voice-net: (516) 968-6860 | | Islip Terrace, New York 11752 | Othernet: gil@limbic.UUCP | +------------------------------------+----------------------------------------+
tlh@pbhacker.UUCP (Lee Hounshell) (07/21/88)
In article <431@icus.UUCP> lenny@icus.UUCP (Lenny Tropiano) writes: >Some phdaemon history... > >The phdaemon everyone is familiar with was probably the version I wrote. >I've been running it here for over 10 months without any problems. There >was some work done by Lee Hounshell (tlh@pbhacker) to avoid those >"popup smgr windows" that stopped all cron processes in this version >of phdaemon, of which he used the version of phdaemon I wrote. Not quite. I used *both* Paul's version and Lenny's version of phdaemon to fix some of the problems with it. Both versions had bugs (this one probably still does too, but I don't know what they are), and I took the best parts of each to create phdaemon version #3. That's the reason I changed the header info on the program source, Lenny. If you examine the code carefully, you'll see that it's interwoven with pieces of both the prior versions... Lee Hounshell