Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!psuvax1!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!coolidge
From: coolidge@roy.cs.uiuc.edu (John Coolidge)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.aux
Subject: Commando operations
Summary: Can I work from Apple's dialogs when building new ones?
Keywords: commando,copyright,lawyers,argh
Message-ID: <1990Jul7.073600.3412@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 7 Jul 90 07:36:00 GMT
Sender: news@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu
Reply-To: coolidge@cs.uiuc.edu
Organization: U of I Computer Science Department and State Penitentiary
Lines: 33

Well, I've been busily porting and patching things to run under A/UX,
and thought it might be nice to provide Commando dialogs for them.
Apple seems to think Commando is where things are at, having provided
Commando documents for everything from the big and complex (cc, ld,
tar) to the extrement trivial (chase, yes). It's certainly a wonderful
memory aid for those programs where you can't quite remember an option
but are sure it exists. The access time is at least competitive with,
and often superior to, that of the man pages.

So Commando is great --- what's the problem? Well, there are all
these great, inspirational, easy-to-copy Commando dialogs in
/mac/lib/cmdo, and they all bear the inspirational words:
/* Copyright Apple Computer, Inc.  1990 */
which tends to make me shy away from reuse, even when building
dialogs for commands which are simply different versions of the
provided commands (the GNU fileutilities, for instance, or GCC).

Can someone from Apple post what they can find out about Apple's
policy with respect to copying bits of Commando dialogs and/or
patching existing dialogs to reflect new features for different
versions of commands? Obviously, we're talking rebuilding things
for new commands, not simply mailing out the whole mess to all
comers. Certainly I can always start from scratch and build
entirely new dialogs, but it's so much easier not reinventing the
wheel... :-)

--John

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
John L. Coolidge     Internet:coolidge@cs.uiuc.edu   UUCP:uiucdcs!coolidge
Of course I don't speak for the U of I (or anyone else except myself)
Copyright 1990 John L. Coolidge. Copying allowed if (and only if) attributed.
You may redistribute this article if and only if your recipients may as well.