ChuckT wrote:
BigDumbDinosaur wrote:
BASIC is "owned" by Dartmouth College, which is where it was invented. Microsoft's copyrights cover their implementation of the language, not the language itself.
You are right and I wasn't thinking about Dartmouth. Microsoft could still prove it is their Basic because of the easter eggs in it and the rest is history. Commodore had an agreement to use Microsoft's basic but I don't know if the agreement precluded what would happen to it upon sale of the company. Commodore did pay for it so they have some rights so I wouldn't be able to tell beyond that.
If you notice, starting with the C-128, Commodore included a Microsoft copyright notice (1977) to acknowledge the source of the interpreter. BASIC 7.0 in the C-128 had a lot of Commodore-specific features, and that had a bearing on Microsoft demanding that Commodore put the copyright notice in the power-on banner.
Quote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
The Open Letter to Hobbyists was an open letter written by Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft, to early personal computer hobbyists, in which Gates expresses dismay at the rampant copyright infringement taking place in the hobbyist community, particularly with regard to his company's software.
In the letter, Gates expressed frustration with most computer hobbyists who were using his company's Altair BASIC software without having paid for it. He asserted that such widespread unauthorized copying in effect discourages developers from investing time and money in creating high-quality software. He cited the unfairness of gaining the benefits of software authors' time, effort, and capital without paying them.
Gates, at the time, all but said that he "owned" BASIC. As I said, he only had a copyright on his implementation. The Dartmouth trustees set him straight on the matter.
I still have to laugh over that letter, as Gates is on a par with the 19th century robber barons who stole much of what made their fortune. There is very little of anything original that came out of Redmond, excepting maybe that annoying paperclip in older versions of MS Office.