Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!apple!portal!cup.portal.com!ts
From: ts@cup.portal.com (Tim W Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.apps
Subject: Re: All Commercial Software Developers or Companies (pls read)
Message-ID: <43743@cup.portal.com>
Date: 27 Jun 91 10:23:43 GMT
References: <56971@nigel.ee.udel.edu>
  <BAUMGART.91Jun23153611@esquire.esquire.dpw.com> <14728@dog.ee.lbl.gov>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 37

< The notion of any type of software needing to be "registered" with any
< large, faceless organization (like the SPA) is ridiculous.  Software is,
< after all, intellectual property.
< 
< If I publish a newspaper, do I need to register it with Mr. Mora?  If my
< software is "unregistered," will his facist program delete it?

Why would you be running Mr. Mora's program?  Don't you already know
what software you use?

It will be companies that will run Mr. Mora's program, because they will
want to know what software is being used at their company.  Let's take
a hypothetical example.  A company buys a database and installs it on
a machine that is used to track orders.  Someone in QC sees it and decides
that it would be cool for tracking bug reports, so they copy it over the
network to their machine and write a QC database.

This spreads through the QC department.  An engineer sees it and decides
this could be nice for keeping track of books in the company engineering
library, so he makes a copy and writes a nifty library management system.

Soon we have a dozen copies and no one even realizes that most of them
are not legitimate.  Somehow word of this gets back to the database
vendor.  The company now receives a note from the legal department
of the database vendor, shows this note to their lawyers, and is told
that they have made a major boo-boo and should give in to any demands
of the database vendor.  Oops.

Companies strongly dislike receiving notes from the legal departments
of other companies.  They even more strongly dislike receiving such
notes and then finding out that it does not matter that they did not
know that their employees were copying this software -- they are still
responsible.

Do you object to a company trying to find out what software it is using?

							Tim Smith