On May 15, 2012, at 6:30 PM, John E. Malmberg wrote: > > The problem is that as Nicholas Clark is being paid for this work, it may not > be legal to do it on a system licensed with Hobby licenses.
The only thing somewhat relevant I can find in my hobbyist license says, "Use of the Licensed Computer is ONLY FOR NON-COMMERCIAL USES (e.g., home use). As such, you may not use the Licensed Computer for any business purposes whatsoever, e.g., to develop applications for resale, to do business accounting, etc." The problem with trying to apply this 1980s-style business model here is that we have a third party that makes very serious but entirely free software and wants to make it work on everything it can get its hands on, including a tiny proprietary operating system called OpenVMS owned by a giant company called HP. Producing free software is certainly not for resale by definition. And it's not "to do business accounting, etc." because what we're talking about is writing, testing, and generally maintaining free software, which doesn't seem to me is a "business purpose" at all in the sense envisioned by the hobbyist license. And someone getting paid by a third party to help HP have better software on its systems doesn't *seem* like something HP would want to prevent, but it's hard to tell. The developer program (DSPP or whatever it's called now) doesn't cover this situation at all. It's somewhat ambiguous whether the hobbyist program covers it. It could be worse; it could be IBM, but I digress. I think the best near-term solution is if Nicholas can get his access to the HP open source systems up and running. If that doesn't work post haste, I will do what I can to raise awareness, or raise a stink, or whatever seems to need raising to get things done. ________________________________________ Craig A. Berry mailto:craigbe...@mac.com "... getting out of a sonnet is much more difficult than getting in." Brad Leithauser
