[comp.sys.amiga] Workbench Restrictions, also MandFxp

john13@garfield.UUCP (05/21/87)

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Regarding the issue of Workbench licensing, perhaps the CATS people (wasn't
that a movie? :-) could clear up some points for me.

1. If someone comes to me and says "I have accidentally scratched my Workbench,
   can I get a copy from you?" is there a prohibition on that? This would be
   while I was working at a Commodore dealer (although that would mean getting
   rid of that cool "hand" picture I always leave on the screen :-).

2. If someone should see that I have all sorts of nifty S: scripts, commands
   put into my C: directory, various new handlers & devices, printer drivers,
   etc, is there anything to prevent me copying *my* Workbench over *his*
   Workbench? In other words, when does it stop being a Workbench and start
   being a disk with Workbench files on it?

3. There are currently still some orders backlogged for 1.2 Enhancer kits, and
   the talk on the net a while ago was "give a copy to anyone who wants it".
   If I let someone copy a 1.2 Workbench, is that against official policy?

I realize that all this legalese is to prevent massive lawsuits, but wouldn't
it be easier to restrict *use* of the files, eg non-profit for free, commercial
with license, prohibition against ripping off for use on other systems, etc?
Then your average Amiga owner could go about his business while the ones who 
wanted to write the Amiga "dir" command for some other computer would be left 
in the cold :-) :-).

John

PS I've been having great problems reaching Doug Merritt using a dumb mailer
(why I'm using it is another story), so I may be better off sending the
uuencoded MandFxp to the binaries newsgroup instead. Note that this is not
the MandelVroom recently posted, but the one by Steve Larocque and Bruce
Dawson that people have claimed 5-sec plot times for. Or would that cause a
"MandelGlut" on the net (it is 122K of uuencode)? On a related note, have there
been more than 3 postings on ".sources" and 4 on ".binaries"?