Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!mcvax!nikhefh!t68
From: t68@nikhefh.hep.nl (Jos Vermaseren)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Posting GEMDOS improvements.
Message-ID: <456@nikhefh.hep.nl>
Date: 21 Apr 88 11:47:50 GMT
Organization: Nikhef-H, Amsterdam (the Netherlands).
Lines: 28
Keywords: GEMDOS



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