> On Feb 9, 2017, at 10:16 AM, Liam Proven <lpro...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On 9 February 2017 at 18:06, geneb <ge...@deltasoft.com> wrote: >> If you don't (at least) have the official distribution media, then >> TECHNICALLY you'd be violating the copyright. Otherwise, it's nonsense.
I started answering Gene with this: Even having a clean official distribution doesn’t automatically grant a license to use it, and I certainly wouldn’t be able to distribute it. Speaking of which, I don’t know what the original license terms were - They may not have been transferrable. They may even have had a specific requirement that only authorized machines can use the software, like Apple’s OS X license. But while I was typing that, Liam’s mail came in, so... > AIUI -- and IANAL -- this is correct, yes. > > The issue here is not running the software, it's _owning_ the > software. This sometimes ties in to ownership of the vendor's hardware > it was intended to run on. > > Apple is slightly different -- the licence for Mac OS X stipulates > that you're only allowed to run it on Apple-branded hardware. This is > somewhere between rare and unique, though, and it has recently been > relaxed slightly to permit use of hypervisors. See above - I don’t know what the original license terms were. They may have had a clause like this. > But otherwise, so long as you own the software or a licence thereto, > you can run it on whatever you want, in most cases. And there’s the rub, because... > Do you own at least 1 of the original machine? Nope. I’ve never even SEEN the machine in real life. > Did the author reverse-engineer the original hardware in order to > emulate it, or use publicly-available docs? Then the emulator is clean > and legit, too. Can’t even say this.
