Before I begin, I don't care about this particular topic.
The site is dead,
the program is dead, and very few people care about GPG in
the first place (especially a very long out of date, definitely insecure version) so if you want to make an exception this once you can zap
the entry, that's fine. To be clear, this has happened before with
the Serva episode where
the author got his feelings irrationally hurt that we called his program nagware (even though it was very obviously
nagging soft
ware).
If you don't want to make an exception, let me point out a few things here that make this absurd:
- Linking There is no legal framework around preventing people from linking to a website. I've seen a few court cases talking about "deep" linking (see the Ghacks-Adobe episode) but certainly nothing for dead links. SYSTEM is correct. As Slashdot has gone into great detail about over many years, any court ruling on this topic it would basically threaten the whole Internet, which is about links.
- Open Source Links There is a legal framework around the GPL where license holders have compelled some of the biggest companies in the world (like Microsoft) to host the code of executable files. Even in that case, they didn't ask for the link to be deleted but more links to point to hosted source code. We are not hosting anything except images and text so this doesn't apply to us. Even if we were, the FSF is not taking a tiny website like ours to court.
- Ownership Even if there was something in the license that allowed for blocking linking and even if you could legally influence people on the web to delete dead links to dead programs, he can't prove he's the license holder. We can for example verify who is running PortableApps.com by contacting someone from that domain. That's impossible to do when all we have a is a dead link to a website that doesn't exist anymore. It's even been excluded from archive.org. It's just as possible that this is someone who hates GPG for unknown reasons wanting us to delete anything to do with that program.
Feel free to just send
the author a link to this thread.