On 2015-08-21 17:21, Peter Cetinski wrote:
This discussion on the legality of sharing manuals, PDFs, etc. leads me to
think about the vintage computing hobby as a whole. While we all encourage the
hobby to grow, the downside is that as it does, the software copyright holders
may start to take notice. As a developer of modern systems who expects to be
paid for my work (except what I share with the community of course) I am in a
conundrum because the hobby cannot succeed without the large collection of
easily accessible vintage software available yet there is no way to “buy” most
of it today. But, we would also not expect or would we pay 1980s retail
prices. I know some generous copyright owners have allowed unrestricted use of
their old software, like Roy Soltoff from Misosys, but many others have not or
have disappeared. I’m fairly new to the hobby so maybe this has already been
hashed out years ago. Just wondering what the community thinks.
My opinion is that people should not try to pretend that their actions
are legal when they are not. While I support work to preserve things, we
really need to get permission from copyright owners before just letting
thing out freely.
I know DEC made a general permission to copy and distribute out-of-print
manuals. They also made some software freely available. I believe pretty
much all PDP-8 software is in there. Some restricted distributions of
PDP-11 software was also made available, but the majority of PDP-11
software is still under copyright and with no permission to redistribute
(DEC sold it). PDP-10 software I think were sold off as well. Not sure
about other parts.
And I don't know much about anything for non-DEC stuff. So while I hope
there are copies of stuff around, think some before redistributing it.
Johnny
