OpenXTalk Forums

Re the legality of abandonware . . .

. . . in the 1970s, when I was a teenager, we recorded our favourite songs from the radio, and from friends who had found the money to buy a record, onto cassette tapes: which was illegal.

I found out it was illegal in about 1990 quite by chance. Our teachers did it, Mum and Dad did it, the school chaplain did it (even played some tapes after the sermon at Evensong) . . .

Never heard about some teenager or their parents ending up in court because they'd recorded some songs by Freddie Mercury.

Nor, for that matter have I heard of someone who has an antiquated Mac at home (I have several) ending up in trouble because they have been merrily getting the software they need for, say, Mac OS 9, or 10.4 from Macintosh Garden (The funny thing is is that I know which software I need because many long years most of it came bundled on my Mac LC475, or the Performa 5200, or the G3 iMac, or the G4 Wind Tunnel, but went the way of all flesh when those machines bust because who backs up their software?)

In 1976 or 7 I was lusting after a hexagonal chess set in an expensive toyshop in Taunton: after the owner watching me glued to the window for 3 Saturdays running, the owner asked me what the problem was: I explained I could not afford to buy the hexagonal chess board + pieces: at which point the man remarked that, for some odd reason, there were 2 copies of the rules inside the box, gave me one of them and told me to go home and make my own set: which I promptly did. I am sure that what I did was "illegal" insofar as the company who had probably ripped off Glinski's Hex chess (he being dead, and Poland being a commie thing, would have patented and copyrighted and all the other things to "nail your head to the floor").

My conscience is 100% free, as it is re my home-made versions of Onitama, Giraffe chess, Kensington, and so on, which I use on a regular basis in my language school. Boardgamegeek doesn't seem to see anything wrong with homemade versions (presumably as long as you are not selling them).

If you do a Googly-Woogly, the only people who are asking questions re the legality of abandonware are U.S. citizens: which, considering their last President (Trump) seems to know the odd thing about 'illegal', and about half the population seem set to vote for him again, is hilarious.

I gave up trying to protect my Devawriter Pro when several people who had NOT paid for it emailed me with questions about its functionality: so I then Open Sourced the thing, and then, oddly enough, started getting a bit of money.

When I found that some people had been pirating my Devawriter I felt quite a warm fuzzy: someone needed the blasted thing.

tperry2x wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2024 7:21 pm Not that I've seen his posts directly, because I've blocked him.
However, I get the quoted gist that forthworld is going on about the legalities of abandonware.

All I said, is that "you'd want to check". No need to get yourself in a twist.

If abandonware isn't a recognised concept, (at least in your world), someone better tell https://www.myabandonware.com/
And also Wikipedia.

People may invent any number of concepts, but the wisdom of circumventing copyright enforcement is a question of, well, enforcement.

Most of the companies who made the software you linked to no longer exist, so it's unlikely anyone would hear from those publishers.

But in a forum with recent discussions about negotiating with the publisher of both DreamCard and LC to obtain their compliance with a possible copyright issue regarding GPL responsibilities, playing by the rules would seem useful when asking them to play by the rules.

richmond62 wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2024 8:19 pm Boardgamegeek doesn't seem to see anything wrong with homemade versions (presumably as long as you are not selling them).

Most print-at-home editions come from the publisher, produced for promotional purposes. Some print-at-home games are for sale.

BGG staff are very hands-on with moderation. US DMCA law requires them to be. If anyone there advocated circumventing a copyright protection mechanism you can bet it will be deleted as soon as it's noticed by staff.

Just to state this clearly, I do not want any pirate software sharing on this site and, NOT THAT ANYONE DID THIS, but please don't post publicly any serial numbers, [k]racks or copy protection circumventing patches or key-gens on this site. Thanks for your cooperatation.

Does rolling your computer's clock back a decade+ constitute circumventing copy protection?

Any links or no-longer-available-for-sale commercial retro-xTalk related things posted on here should fall into the category of fair-use, since we are only interested in these for archival, historical, critical, satirical (?) and/or discussion purposes only. Other than expired xTalks/xCards, please do not post any commercial software written in the last 100 years or so (sarcasm) on this site.

I'd argue that they would receive ZERO dollars in damages (and probably have to pay court costs) if they tried to sue Archive.org for WaybackMachine historical snapshot of a website, particularly when a few years later, after a crowd funding campaign effort, they basically released a much more functional version of 'DreamCard' thing as free open source LC CE 6.x. I mean what did 'DreamCard' have that LC CE 6.x didn't have?

Copyright Law seems to be a jumbled mess of centuries of accumulated precedent that has stretched it way beyond its original intended scope around the invention of the printing press. I recently learned that the only reason software even falls under Copyright Law is due to the punch rolls of the Player Pianos in the 1800s, which was extended to punch card programming of the dark ages of early computing.

As far as the idea of trying to maintain some sort of relationship with (one of) our Ex-mothership(s) for the purpose of negotiate something? ...that just seems like a waste of time and effort to me, better spent moving forward on our own path(s).

OpenXTalkPaul wrote: ↑Thu Mar 21, 2024 3:04 am I mean what did 'DreamCard' have that LC CE 6.x didn't have?

This is the productive path. Forward...

Presumably the reason the piano rolls were protected is because there was an attempt to protect weaving patterns encoded in Jacquard Loom cards before that.

richmond62 wrote: ↑Thu Mar 21, 2024 8:01 am Presumably the reason the piano rolls were protected is because there was an attempt to protect weaving patterns encoded in Jacquard Loom cards before that.

Right, centuries of precedent. It seems it was about governing machines that make ink markings on paper and was soon extended to include 'not necessarily 'ink' marks and then continued on from there, now it includes all sorts of things that aren't on paper at all.

I thought I added this to my post last night, but I don't see it, maybe I passed out...
The U.S. Law DMCA (which I'm not sure that applies here) or Digital Millennial Copyright Act actually protects sites that allow user posted content (basically all of 'Social Media'). The way it works is the rights holders or their representatives can send a DMCA takedown notices and then the site has a reasonable amount of time after receiving such a notice to take down any infringing material. It doesn't mandate policing of people's opinions about the morality of using sites that share 'AbandonWare', I won't do that.

OpenXTalkPaul wrote: ↑Thu Mar 21, 2024 1:30 pm It doesn't mandate policing of people's opinions about the morality of using sites that share 'AbandonWare', I won't do that.

I've not seen morality raised as an issue in this thread.

My question was about two other aspects:

1. Marketing: is it a good look to encourage circumventing copyright enforcement mechanisms? On that we agree, unsurprisingly since that's the sort of stuff we see in most forums' ToS.

2. Negotiation: there was some recent lengthy conversation here about submitting a request for components to the copyright owner of the OXT engine, where exemplifying the sort of compliance being asked for would normally be useful. You've since clarified that won't be needed, so that part is no longer a consideration.

The bottom line is the one you laid down clearly: there's nothing in someone else's 20 year old proprietary software that isn't in OXT, so there's no practical reason to have public discussions here about bypassing it's copyright protection.


As a side note, I had a good conversation this past weekend at the SoCal Linux Expo with a vendor who makes a license compliance automation tool. OXT isn't yet pulling enough outside packages to warrant that, but if it's of interest they offer a free demo tier which might be useful as inclusions grow.

FourthWorld wrote: ↑Thu Mar 21, 2024 2:51 pm

OpenXTalkPaul wrote: ↑Thu Mar 21, 2024 1:30 pm It doesn't mandate policing of people's opinions about the morality of using sites that share 'AbandonWare', I won't do that.

I've not seen morality raised as an issue in this thread.

My question was about two other aspects:

1. Marketing: is it a good look to encourage circumventing copyright enforcement mechanisms? On that we agree, unsurprisingly since that's the sort of stuff we see in most forums' ToS.

2. Negotiation: there was some recent lengthy conversation here about submitting a request for components to the copyright owner of the OXT engine, where exemplifying the sort of compliance being asked for would normally be useful. You've since clarified that won't be needed, so that part is no longer a consideration.

The bottom line is the one you laid down clearly: there's nothing in someone else's 20 year old proprietary software that isn't in OXT, so there's no practical reason to have public discussions here about bypassing it's copyright protection.


As a side note, I had a good conversation this past weekend at the SoCal Linux Expo with a vendor who makes a license compliance automation tool. OXT isn't yet pulling enough outside packages to warrant that, but if it's of interest they offer a free demo tier which might be useful as inclusions grow.

1. I just re-skimmed this thread and maybe I'm missing something here, but I don't see where anyone was advocating for circumventing any copy protection mechanisms in this thread, so your comments about if it's a good look for marketing or not kind of baffle me.

2. I can only speak for myself, but I had already assumed we would not be getting any help in any way from over yonder, and judging by their response to other people request, I was correct. Frankly I was actually quite surprised to see that they've ever even publicly mentioned any projects going on over here.
I was already resolved to keep chiseling away at the beast until I can bend it to my will. The build process needs to be modified in my opinion and its dependencies need to be updated anyway, and I think we can make it so that we can be more agile in tinkering around with its parts, in setups with limited resources and no auto-build nightly build bots and whatnot. But again I can't speak for anyone else's plans for their Community fork or any other xTalk efforts.

The only reason something like this might be of interests that I can think of is the retro vintage computer user where someone may want to run an old .rev stack on Mac OS X 10.2 - 10.4? I'm not sure what the requirements were for first GPL version LC CE v6.0.1 it might not run on pre-Leo/Snow-Leo OS X ? I know Carbon was still used in some places and it still had PPC (32bit support) so I would think that should've still ran on 10.4.x Tiger? I'll have to check it some time on my trusty old MMD G4 rig.

richmond62 wrote: ↑Wed Mar 20, 2024 8:19 pm If you do a Googly-Woogly, the only people who are asking questions re the legality of abandonware are U.S. citizens: which, considering their last President (Trump) seems to know the odd thing about 'illegal', and about half the population seem set to vote for him again, is hilarious.

This is not true, talk to retro-gamers about how Nintendo, a Japanese company, feels about it.

Also not true that about half of the US population seem set to vote for him (Trump) again, and it wasn't true even when he won the electoral college in 2016 (yet, lost the popular vote). It usually takes support of about 19-22% of the voting eligible population to win the Presidency. He may be popular in the Republican primary with Republicans (who already believed all sorts of nonsense about things like tax-cuts paying for themselves), but that section of the vote is only about 25% of the voting eligible I believe, and he's only got about 60% of support of those (Nikki Haley is still pulling in 20% share of Rs, AFTER she's already dropped out of the primary race).
The real problem from my perspective, and for most of my lifetime, has been that most elections almost half of the voting eligible population doesn't even bother to vote at all for whatever reasons.
Being a US citizen who is quite proud to say I have loathed that man long before that humorless grifter oaf got angry when Obama made a (totally deserved) joke about him in 2011 spurring Don the Con to decided to play politician, I don't find anything about the fact that a not-insignificant amount of my fellow citizens still think that it's a good idea for that amoral fraudster traitor who proudly publicly proclaims his intentions to NOT at all honor his oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution, be put back into the highest office in the land (and potentially into a position of authoritarian autocracy if he has his way) is at all hilarious.

Sshweew, had to get that out of my system. I come here in part to NOT think about politics, please don't bring it in.

The only reply I can manage to that 'kaboom' is a prayer that:

1. You get Granddad Biden as your next President.

2. You rejig your constitution so, in future, your choice is not between a rampant, ego-maniac criminal and an old sausage.

And from now on I'll steer clear of United States politics.

there's nothing in someone else's 20 year old proprietary software that isn't in OXT

Hairy things.

Here is a list of all the deployment possibilities of RunRev 2.0.3:
- -
UNIX!

http://web.archive.org/web/200310111001 ... 0/unix.tgz

richmond62 wrote: ↑Fri Mar 22, 2024 11:02 am The only reply I can manage to that 'kaboom' is a prayer that:

1. You get Granddad Biden as your next President.

2. You rejig your constitution so, in future, your choice is not between a rampant, ego-maniac criminal and an old sausage.

And from now on I'll steer clear of United States politics.

I'll do one better than actual Billionaire Mark Cuban who said he'd vote for Biden over Trump even if Biden was receiving his last rites, and say that I'd vote for that old sausage over Trump even if he was Nixon's head in a jar (from Futurama).

richmond62 wrote: ↑Fri Mar 22, 2024 11:04 am

there's nothing in someone else's 20 year old proprietary software that isn't in OXT

Hairy things.

Here is a list of all the deployment possibilities of RunRev 2.0.3:
-
SShot 2024-03-22 at 12.58.30.png
-
UNIX!

http://web.archive.org/web/200310111001 ... 0/unix.tgz

That's pretty cool, there's a FreeBSD, SGI IRIX, and even an AIX build and all, but if it needs a passcode or something to try them out then there's not much point to downloading it
It might be interesting to try to build the 6.x community source code for a BSD, I imagine it's more easily doable from that earlier source.
I would imagine there's a JavaVM 6 or better available for most of those OS so I might use OpenXION or something else for an xTalk if I was running those (hmm helloSystem is a FreeBSD..).

As far as I remember 203 might be one of the versions where you could code for free as long as you used no more than 10 lines of code per object.

I did my second Master's thing with RR 201 on 10 line limits with chained scripts in fields . . .

I will try and find 201 for you: you can "knock together" some daft, one card stack with a smiley face on the thing and run off a whole slew of standalones and fool around with them on freeBSD and so forth.

Aha:

Click on where it says "Free Edition":

https://web.archive.org/web/20030621171 ... ution.html

Here, at work, on MacOS 10.7 Lion the standalone builder in RunRev 4.0 appears a bit confused:
-

Turn on 'build for Linux' and the other options will be available.

I know that might not make much sense, but the checkbox 'build for linux' is a trigger to also build for Solaris and Spark at that stage. I believe it used to make seperate output directories if memory serves. (it was a long time ago since I built anything for Solaris / Unix to be fair).

And so: "here we are" with an iMac running MacOS 10.6.8 and RunRev 3.5 seeing about building a standalone for some UNIXy things:
- -
The 2 options ARE greyed out.

I assume this is because in the 'Runtime' folder there are the following folders:

Linux/x86-32

Mac OS Classic/Fat

Mac OS X/PowerPC-32
Mac OS X/Universal
Mac OS X/x86-32

Windows/x86-32

Presumably if there were ones for the UNIX offerings those boxes would NOT be greyed out.

Of course the question is where one might obtain those folders and the engines they contain.

Fossicking around on the Wayback Machine, while being a fascinating experience does not turn up engines for SPARC or Solaris.

I suspect those were dropped quite a while before RunRev 3.5 and only those 'ghosts' remained in the Standalone settings stack.

That's a pain. Sorry to send you on a wild goose chase in that case.

I'm sure I've seen these become available previously. I'm not sure when or how now as it was what feels like a lifetime ago, but I'll have to have a play with things on ancient hardware when I get a moment.