t68@nikhefh.hep.nl (Jos Vermaseren) (04/21/88)
I have a legal/moral question about posting programs. If I make a disassembly of a small part of an operating system (guess which one) and make some improvements/bug fixes, can I post the resulting binary in such a form that people may run it from their auto folder? The point is that it is impossible to run this program if you don't have the ROM version for which the bug fix was made (it is only part of the operating system), so I am not robbing anybody from their just revenues. The particular cases I have in mind are: 1: recent noise about improvements in the performance of GEMDOS. 2: a book that was recently published in Germany with a discompilation of of GEMDOS. This last thing seems to be fully illegal to me. Is one really allowed to do this? If the concensus is that I am allowed to post improvements to GEMDOS I will post the improvements that go currently under the name JAMDOS. They have now some months of testing and seem to work rather well in about 10 systems that are mainly used by scientists and hackers for programming purposes. Thanks, Jos Vermaseren, t68@nikhefh.uucp
wes@obie.UUCP (Barnacle Wes) (04/25/88)
In article <456@nikhefh.hep.nl>, t68@nikhefh.hep.nl (Jos Vermaseren) writes: > I have a legal/moral question about posting programs. > > If I make a disassembly of a small part of an operating system (guess > which one) and make some improvements/bug fixes, can I post the resulting > binary in such a form that people may run it from their auto folder? The > point is that it is impossible to run this program if you don't have the > ROM version for which the bug fix was made (it is only part of the operating > system), so I am not robbing anybody from their just revenues. Under the copyright laws in the United States, if the OS you are speaking of is copyrighted, you are producing a `derivative work' and must license the right to distribute it. You can easily defend doing this for yourself under the clause that allows owners of software to make adaptations to the software to run _correctly_ on the owners system. I don't think you could justify distributing your patches this way (unless, of course, Atari decides not to pursue it). Morally, I think it's wrong for Atari to NOT distribute the bug fixes Allan Pratt has worked so hard on, and we need so badly! But the Tramiels don't seem too worried about moral issues, do they? -- /\ - "Against Stupidity, - {backbones}! /\/\ . /\ - The Gods Themselves - utah-cs!uplherc! / \/ \/\/ \ - Contend in Vain." - sp7040!obie! / U i n T e c h \ - Schiller - wes