greim@sbsvax.UUCP (Michael Greim) (02/26/88)
I have a question concerning copyright. In the course of a project I used curses for screen management. I got so fed up with its bugs and inabilities that I decided to extend it. This was no legal problem because we have a source license for BSD 4.* for VAX. When I finished I realized I had written a totally new product. My question is : can I sell this new thing of mine ? Or does it depend on any copyrights on curses and if so, whose ? To clarify: I call my product "CURRY". This reminds one of "CURSES" and also suggests a certain "newness" and difference. (And I couldn't come up with something better, and now I am stuck with it. :-# ) The library /usr/lib/curry has 79558 byte compared to original 35450 of /usr/lib/curses. I have changed the window structure some, and extended the functionality. With CURRY you can use up to 4 attributes to your characters, you can take them from up to 4 character sets. With new termcap entries you can specify those commands, you can set graphic symbols to use in line drawing. I implemented pull-up menus and a window manager which is part of the library. The refresh routines work some terminal functions which have not been used up-to-then, like 'change scrolling region', 'scroll up', 'scroll down' ... I added error routines which give you sensible messages in addition to the usual return values. New functions are for instance : scrollup, scrolldown, wchange (to change an attribute on a region on the screen), wrectangle (which allows you to box a portion of your window), ... And I removed some bugs from curses. The core of CURRY is CURSES all right, but I made changes in almost every routine. And I kept some stuff just to be a little bit compatible (ain't that like 'a little pregnant' ? :-). CURRY is implemented and kicking (fully legally !) on VAX 4.3BSD, SUN and a VAX running ULTRIX. Any responses are welcome. Thanx in advance. Michael +------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | UUCP: ...!uunet!unido!sbsvax!greim | Michael T. Greim | | or greim@sbsvax.UUCP | Universitaet des Saarlandes | | CSNET: greim%sbsvax.uucp@Germany.CSnet| FB 10 - Informatik (Dept. of CS) | | ARPA: greim%sbsvax.uucp@uunet.UU.NET | Bau 36, Im Stadtwald 15 | | Phone: +49 681 302 2434 | D-6600 Saarbruecken 11, West Germany | +------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | "And as the sun pulls away from the shore and our boat sinks slowly in the | | west ..." Spike Jones | +------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
steve@crcmar.crc.uucp (Steve Ardron) (03/09/88)
In response to someone's questions about selling a product heavily based on another, possibly copyrighted product. You might want to try selling your modifications back to the original designers, probably getting you a flat payment, but maybe a percentage of royalties. This would get around any possible copyright difficulties, and saves you the problem or marketing etc., that is assuming you made some modifications they are interested in. Where I heard of this being done before, a company got >$10K for some work that took a week or two of a consultants time (granted the consultant costed them around $5K, but they wanted the changes made anyway). Just a thought, Stevie.