At 06:56 PM 29/09/00 +0530, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
Biju Chacko rearranged electrons thusly: > The question is pretty academic because nobody is going to prosecute me. I > was just wondering what the legal aspects of using software like this > without paying for it. Copyright still exists ...
Yep... I rather thought so. It's unfortunate really, I think old software binaries ought to be put into the public domain / available at no cost. It may be useful to somebody. And the idea of something that somebody like me slogged over to make, quietly succumbing to digital rust is pretty depressing.
It's nice to see a company like Borland being clued in on this. Some of their old development tools are available for free download at http://community.borland.com/museum .
> This also affects the hundreds of job-typing centres that use WordStar on > DOS.Remember the way Ray Noorda of Caldera and a few others sued M$ about DR-DOS?The question was who owned CP/M ;) M$ had all sorts of grief over that case ...
DR-DOS is free for non-commercial use now. You can download it from ftp://ftp.lineo.com/drdos All the versions are there. I am, in fact, running it on an old 386SX that I have.
Contrast that with M$ and IBM who are _still_ selling DOS (individual copies, not bulk orders for the embedded market)
Biju