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A.9.1 Would you like me to register you a nicer domain name?
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A.9.2 Would you like free web hosting for the PuTTY web site?
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A.9.3 Would you link to my web site from the PuTTY web site?
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A.9.4 Why don't you move PuTTY to SourceForge?
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A.9.5 Why can't I subscribe to the putty-bugs mailing list?
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A.9.6 If putty-bugs isn't a general-subscription mailing list, what is?
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A.9.7 How can I donate to PuTTY development?
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A.9.8 Can I have permission to put PuTTY on a cover disk / distribute it with other software / etc?
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A.9.9 Can you sign an agreement indemnifying us against security problems in PuTTY?
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A.9.10 Can you sign this form granting us permission to use/distribute PuTTY?
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A.9.11 Can you write us a formal notice of permission to use PuTTY?
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A.9.12 Can you sign anything for us?
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A.9.13 If you won't sign anything, can you give us some sort of assurance that you won't make PuTTY closed-source in
future?
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A.9.14 Can you provide us with export control information / FIPS certification for PuTTY?
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A.9.15 As one of our existing software vendors, can you just fill in this questionnaire for us?
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A.9.16 The sha1sums / sha256sums / etc files on your download page don't match the binaries.
A.9.1 Would you like me to register you a nicer domain name?
No, thank you. Even if you can find one (most of them seem to have been registered already, by people who didn't ask whether we actually wanted it before they applied), we're happy with the PuTTY web site being exactly where it is. It's not hard to find (just type ‘putty’ into
google.com
and we're the first link returned), and we don't believe the administrative hassle of moving the site
would be worth the benefit.
In addition, if we did want a custom domain name, we would want to run it ourselves, so we knew for certain that it would continue to point where we wanted it, and wouldn't suddenly change or do strange things. Having it registered for us by a third party who we don't even know is not the best way to achieve this.
A.9.2 Would you like free web hosting for the PuTTY web site?
We already have some, thanks.
A.9.3 Would you link to my web site from the PuTTY web site?
Only if the content of your web page is of definite direct interest to PuTTY users. If your content is unrelated, or only tangentially related, to PuTTY, then the link would simply be advertising for you.
One very nice effect of the Google ranking mechanism is that by and large, the most popular web sites get the highest rankings. This means that when an ordinary person does a search, the top item in the search is very likely to be a high-quality site or the site they actually wanted, rather than the site which paid the most money for its ranking.
The PuTTY web site is held in high esteem by Google, for precisely this reason: lots of people have linked to it simply because they like PuTTY, without us ever having to ask anyone to link to us. We feel that it would be an abuse of this esteem to use it to boost the ranking of random advertisers' web sites. If you want your web site to have a high Google ranking, we'd prefer that you achieve this the way we did - by being good enough at what you do that people will link to you simply because they like you.
In particular, we aren't interested in trading links for money (see above), and we certainly aren't interested in trading links for other links (since we have no advertising on our web site, our Google ranking is not even directly worth anything to us). If we don't want to link to you for free, then we probably won't want to link to you at all.
If you have software based on PuTTY, or specifically designed to interoperate with PuTTY, or in some other way of genuine interest to PuTTY users, then we will probably be happy to add a link to you on our Links page. And if you're running a particularly valuable mirror of the PuTTY web site, we might be interested in linking to you from our Mirrors page.
A.9.4 Why don't you move PuTTY to SourceForge?
Partly, because we don't want to move the web site location (see
question A.9.1
).