Also, security reasons. PuTTY is a security product, and as such it is particularly important to guard the code and the web site against unauthorised modifications which might introduce subtle security flaws. Therefore, we prefer that the Git repository, web site and FTP site remain where they are, under the direct control of system administrators we know and trust personally, rather than being run by a large organisation full of people we've never met and which is known to have had breakins in the past. No offence to SourceForge; I think they do a wonderful job. But they're not ideal for everyone, and in particular they're not ideal for us.
A.9.5 Why can't I subscribe to the putty-bugs mailing list? Because you're not a member of the PuTTY core development team. The putty-bugs mailing list is not a general newsgroup-like discussion forum; it's a contact address for the core developers, and an internal mailing list for us to discuss things among ourselves. If we opened it up for everybody to subscribe to, it would turn into something more like a newsgroup and we would be completely overwhelmed by the volume of traffic. It's hard enough to keep up with the list as it is.
A.9.6 If putty-bugs isn't a general-subscription mailing list, what is? There isn't one, that we know of.
If someone else wants to set up a mailing list or other forum for PuTTY users to help each other with common problems, that would be fine with us, though the PuTTY team would almost certainly not have the time to read it. It's probably better to use one of the established newsgroups for this purpose (see section B.1.2
). A.9.7 How can I donate to PuTTY development? Please, please don't feel you have to. PuTTY is completely free software, and not shareware. We think it's very important that everybody who wants to use PuTTY should be able to, whether they have any money or not; so the last thing we would want is for a PuTTY user to feel guilty because they haven't paid us any money. If you want to keep your money, please do keep it. We wouldn't dream of asking for any.
Having said all that, if you still really want to give us money, we won't argue :-) The easiest way for us to accept donations is if you send money to <anakin@pobox.com> using PayPal (www.paypal.com
). If you don't like PayPal, talk to us; we can probably arrange some alternative means. Small donations (tens of dollars or tens of euros) will probably be spent on beer or curry, which helps motivate our volunteer team to continue doing this for the world. Larger donations will be spent on something that actually helps development, if we can find anything (perhaps new hardware, or a copy of Windows XP), but if we can't find anything then we'll just distribute the money among the developers. If you want to be sure your donation is going towards something worthwhile, ask us first. If you don't like these terms, feel perfectly free not to donate. We don't mind.
A.9.8 Can I have permission to put PuTTY on a cover disk / distribute it with other software / etc? Yes. For most things, you need not bother asking us explicitly for permission; our licence already grants you permission.
A.9.9 Can you sign an agreement indemnifying us against security problems in PuTTY? No!
A vendor of physical security products (e.g. locks) might plausibly be willing to accept financial liability for a product that failed to perform as advertised and resulted in damage (e.g. valuables being stolen). The reason they can afford to do this is because they sell a lot of units, and only a small proportion of them will fail; so they can meet their financial liability out of the income from all the rest of their sales, and still have enough left over to make a profit. Financial liability is intrinsically linked to selling your product for money.