C70:info-cpm (08/05/82)
>From bbloom@BRL Wed Aug 4 21:38:25 1982
An open query to the readership:
With the recent discussion on the diffusion of public domain software into
the proprietary area, what about information going the other way?
In particular I am faced with a situation in that someone has asked me for a
copy of a certain document that I wrote. The document was created from both
the WordStar operators manual and the WordStar Customization notes and
consists of about 4 pages of nothing but patch labels, hex locations, purpose
of location and defaults. I had made this up several months ago as I
created several individualized versions of WordStar for the people that used
my office machine. A would say about half the locations are from the manual
and half from the notes. For instance, more than one page is taken just
from the various terminal and printer control codes in the manual.
"Obviously" this information is proprietary. Or is it? Is is absolutely
useless to anyone without WordStar. But MicroPro charges $100 for the
customization notes and they would be useless too without WordStar.
(Somewhere I heard the price is now $250 - if it is, it's not worth it.) If
one listens to somebody like Sorcim (SuperCalc) even copying one page from
the manual is reason for law suits. Every page of their manual is marked
"reproduction by any method is strickly prohibited" and they want $50 per
user (plus the original purchase price) if SuperCalc is put on multi-user
machines.
So how should this be treated? What I have been doing is simply using the
list to answer specific questions such as the recent INFO-CPM question of
where is the .po default location, but not freely giving out the entire
list. For that matter do the third person vendors that write such things as
the "Introduction of WordStar" pay a fee/royality to MicroPro? That
document is based on the WordStar users manual just like mine is.
And in passing, the MicroPro WordStar customization are good if you what it
do such things as moving commands around, changing defaults, or change the
message texts that are produced. They do not tell you how WordStar works
nor do they give all the possible settings. (One of the reasons I bought
them was to find the location and change some of the "special find
characters", print control characters, default tabstops, and screen overlap.
None of these are listed. - Anybody else know where they are? MicroPro has
been very consistant to my requests - they have ignored both me, my company
letterhead, and two different vendors that I've asked through.)
As this is something that I like to do, that is distill documentation down
to a bare usable minimum for reference purposes after reading the full
documentation, I'm sure this will happen again. (I've also got a one
standard page complete WordStar command summary, one page terminal control
codes [the H19 only took 2-1/2" by ~4"!])
What's your opinion? -- Bob Bloom (bbloom at brl)
P.S. My 8 bits on INFO-MICRO/CPM: Why not merge MICRO and CPM and them
split them between the 8 bit world and 16 bit universe? I find all of the
16bit stuff a "bit" uncomprehensable. (sorry)