-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Rui Miguel Silva Seabra <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >On Tue, 2006-02-21 at 11:32 +0000, Bernd Jendrissek wrote: >> The reason I wonder is that there is still an awful lot of old >> software floating around that is still useful to some people, and for >> all I know the source code may be lost forever. Supposing the >> copyright holder can be tracked down, and is willing to cooperate, is >> it conceivably possible to get all this stuff released under the GPL? > >And this is probably why the reasoning is a moot point.
??? >Can any of those programs actually do anything useful? Run at least? My job requires me to work with TopSpeed C 3.10 which says Copyright 1992 when it starts up. It's very useful for what we do with it: building programs that run on a PC-104 80386 host in real mode. AFAICT the current copyright holder seems to be Clarion but they only sketchily even mention TopSpeed C in their history page. I have no idea if they'd want to GPL the thing but that's what made me wonder. >Don't run if you can't walk.... it's better to just use public domain, I >guess. John Hasler made a similar point about using the MIT licence. That might not suit the copyright holder's whim; they might actually like the "viral" nature of the GPL, even for binary-only abandonware. They might *like* the fact that licensees can't legally prevent further redistribution of an improved version they derived. Translations should be easy enough to do, for example. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.2 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Please fetch my new key 804177F8 from hkp://wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net/ iD8DBQFD/CZRwyMv24BBd/gRAkP+AJ4kTx7Wkradj6H2UJr0WJwwjeSWXACfVOoP ttmeTXR8J2dF/JJRpGC0NNk= =wZdH -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Gnu-misc-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnu-misc-discuss
