On Tue, Jul 3, 2018 at 1:48 PM Dale E Sterner <sunbeam...@juno.com> wrote: > > My goal was to find the legal owner and see if they > would sell me a copy of the source code and let > me make changes for personal use only. > It has to have a copywrite on it so why didn't > the office find one; it seems a simple job. > Their reply was that they couldn't find anything, > How is that possible? They never asked for > more imformation.
What if it never *had* a copyright registered? For the Copyright Office to be aware of it and have records, someone would have had to file for a registration, submitted a couple of copies, and paid a fee. I very much doubt anyone did. Stuff like that is usually handled as a trade secret. It's protected because no one else can get access to it. If what you are writing is source code for proprietary software you intend to *sell*, that's usually what you *want*. Crosstalk was a product of Crosstalk Communications, in Atlanta, GA. up till 1990. Yhey were bought by Digital Communications Associates, which issued Crosstalk till 1994. DCA was subsequently bought by Bellevue, WA based Attachmate, which was also in the terminal emulator business, and they subsequently merged with WRQ.. I used Crosstalk at home, and WRQ software in a corporate setting. Heaven knows if the Crosstalk source still *exists*, who has access if it does, and who would be legally authorized to sell it to you. Even if you could find that person, I doubt they'd sell. I went around this elsewhere with a guy who is doing a replacement for the Busybox package with the first target being Android. (Android developers are using what he is doing internally.) One missing piece was awk, which is required by various other things. Awk was written at AT&T Bell Labs by Alfred Aho, Thomas Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan as a component of Unix. AT&T Bell Labs was spun off an became part of Lucent Technologies. Lucent later merged with French telecom outfit Alcatel. Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan's original source for awk is available. Brian is a Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University these days. I asked, and *he'd* be delighted if it got used for this, but while the source is available, the *rights* are up in the air. Technically, Alcatel/Lucent currently holds them, but no one there is likely to even be aware of it and heaven know what would happen if they were asked. The chap doing the Busybox replacement has been around the licensing block on other stuff, and won't use it unless he has clear documented legal rights to do so, so he's going to have to roll his own awk implementation. > DS ______ Dennis ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
