free time in exchange for some money, but if you try to bribe us for a big feature it's entirely possible that we simply won't have the time to spare - whether you pay us or not. (Also, we don't accept bribes to add bad features to the Wishlist, because our desire to provide high-quality software to the users comes first.)
•Offer to help us write the code. This is probably the only way to get a feature implemented quickly, if it's a big one that we don't have time to do ourselves.
B.5 Support requests
If you're trying to make PuTTY do something for you and it isn't working, but you're not sure whether it's a bug or not, then please consider looking for help somewhere else. This is one of the most common types of mail the PuTTY team receives, and we simply don't have time to answer all the questions. Questions of this type include:
•If you want to do something with PuTTY but have no idea where to start, and reading the manual hasn't helped, try posting to a newsgroup (see
section B.1.2
) and see if someone can explain it to you.
•If you have tried to do something with PuTTY but it hasn't worked, and you aren't sure whether it's a bug in PuTTY or a bug in your SSH server or simply that you're not doing it right, then try posting to a newsgroup (see
section B.1.2
) and see if
someone can solve your problem. Or try doing the same thing with a different SSH client and see if it works with that. Please do not report it as a PuTTY bug unless you are really sure it is a bug in PuTTY.
•If someone else installed PuTTY for you, or you're using PuTTY on someone else's computer, try asking them for help first. They're more likely to understand how they installed it and what they expected you to use it for than we are.
•If you have successfully made a connection to your server and now need to know what to type at the server's command prompt, or other details of how to use the server-end software, talk to your server's system administrator. This is not the PuTTY team's problem. PuTTY is only a communications tool, like a telephone; if you can't speak the same language as the person at the other end of the phone, it isn't the telephone company's job to teach it to you.
If you absolutely cannot get a support question answered any other way, you can try mailing it to us, but we can't guarantee to have time to answer it.
B.6 Web server administration
If the PuTTY web site is down (Connection Timed Out), please don't bother mailing us to tell us about it. Most of us read our e-mail on the same machines that host the web site, so if those machines are down then we will notice before we read our e-mail. So there's no point telling us our servers are down.
Of course, if the web site has some other error (Connection Refused, 404 Not Found, 403 Forbidden, or something else) then we might not have noticed and it might still be worth telling us about it.
If you want to report a problem with our web site, check that you're looking at our real web site and not a mirror. The real web site is at
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
; if that's not where you're reading this, then don't report the
problem to us until you've checked that it's really a problem with the main site. If it's only a problem with the mirror, you should try to contact the administrator of that mirror site first, and only contact us if that doesn't solve the problem (in case we need to remove the mirror from our list).
B.7 Asking permission for things
PuTTY is distributed under the MIT Licence (see
appendix C
for details). This means you can do almost anything you like with our
software, our source code, and our documentation. The only things you aren't allowed to do are to remove our copyright notices or the licence text itself, or to hold us legally responsible if something goes wrong.
So if you want permission to include PuTTY on a magazine cover disk, or as part of a collection of useful software on a CD or a web site, then permission is already granted. You don't have to mail us and ask. Just go ahead and do it. We don't mind.
(If you want to distribute PuTTY alongside your own application for use with that application, or if you want to distribute PuTTY within your own organisation, then we recommend, but do not insist, that you offer your own first-line technical support, to answer questions about the interaction of PuTTY with your environment. If your users mail us directly, we won't be able to tell them anything useful about your specific setup.)
If you want to use parts of the PuTTY source code in another program, then it might be worth mailing us to talk about technical details, but if all you want is to ask permission then you don't need to bother. You already have permission.