Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!oodis01!uplherc!sp7040!obie!wes
From: wes@obie.UUCP (Barnacle Wes)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.atari.st
Subject: Re: Posting GEMDOS improvements.
Message-ID: <170@obie.UUCP>
Date: 24 Apr 88 18:31:05 GMT
References: <456@nikhefh.hep.nl>
Organization: the Well of Souls
Lines: 25
Keywords: GEMDOS
Summary: Legal issues involved

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?
-- 
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