"Roeland M.J. Meyer" wrote:
For the record, I've tried to get you guy's attention with this stuff over two years ago. Y'all strongly told me it was non-operational. But, when systems start failing, and it becomes an operational issue, it's way too late.
Well, I was listening; we just didn't have rough consensus. But, maybe it's not _that_ late. Some private messages have said that NSI claims the whois contact information is now their "property". Here's an alternative: fight fire with fire. The collection of contact information interesting to network operators would be separately copyrightable under the new "digital millenium" act. After all, we never use most of the relatively useless information maintained by NSI. Would it be OK with the rest of us for Rodney Joffe to create a database of all the requests and answers made thru geektools? Users could add reliability notes about whether the contacts are valid. The resulting "compilation" would be what we distribute to our mirrors. This requires that we all use geektools to seed the database. We would change the Open/Net/Free/*BSD/*nix whois distributions to point at geektools. (Especially as default whois is pretty useless right now.) And that we trust Rodney (or some more formal entity) to administer the copyright in a way that is pleasing to us. In our naming tradition, we could call this new database "OpenWhois" or "NetWhois" or even "FreeWhois". ;-) Any consensus? WSimpson@UMich.edu Key fingerprint = 17 40 5E 67 15 6F 31 26 DD 0D B9 9B 6A 15 2C 32