On 7/29/20 8:20 PM, Warner Losh wrote:
On Wed, Jul 29, 2020 at 3:00 PM Bill Gunshannon via cctalk <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:On 7/29/20 4:22 PM, Bob Smith wrote: > I am not sure I understand your "as it turns out there was only one" Bill. > Am I correct in assuming you are talking about DEC owned, and meaning > that Bob Supnik one? > > John Wilson's Ersatz 11, aka E11, was and is a great functioning > emulator, but not owned by DEC. > We were discussing the Mentec Hobbyist License. It never covered E11 or anything other than the Supnik Emulator when he was a DEC employee and DEC actually owned the IP.How much of the IP does DEC need to own (the license is unclear on this point)? Unless they conveyed the Copyrights to Supnik in writing (which is possible), they (well their successors in interest) still have an ownership interest in the emulator.
This has been done to death years ago. DEC gave up all ownership of what is now known as SIMH. Look at the sources. There are no DEC Copyrights. There are Bob Supnik Copyrights from 1993 forward.
One could make a case that the wording of the license is imprecise enough
The wording is only imprecise to those who do not wish to follow it. It is, by far, the cleanest and plainest written Hobbyist License I have ever seen.
(it didn't exclude successors in interest, for example).
Successors to who? It stopped being the property of DEC before DEC went away. It became the sole property of Bob Supnik as reflected in the Copyright messages contained in the source files.
Though finding out would require litigation, which is an expensive game... and is apparently against the wishes of Mentec, at least as expressed privately over the years...
Expressed privately to who?
The problem with the license being that it's written in a bit too plain language which makes it a bit ambiguous once DEC was sold to Compaq and then to HP since they are a successor interest for many other things...
The EMULATOR in question ceased to be DEC's before DEC was bought by Compaq. They were never owners of or in control of SIMH. Period. And with this, I am done. At least until this silly question comes up again in the future as I am sure it will. bill
