Copyright considerations

[BigEd]

If there is no creative effort in something, it is not subject to copyright - this would certainly allow for one line of Basic which only make a single SYS call and might well allow for other things.

Edit: if you feel there might be something mixed into your work which you think might be copyright by someone and for which you don't have a license, you might seek a license, or you might publish anyway but with an annotation. For example you might be able to say that the original author could not be reached, that you believe no economic harm is being done, and you offer to withdraw your mixed work if you hear from the copyright holder. This is relatively common. As a working example, people often republish Microsoft's Basics, and works derived from them. In the case of old source code (and many other cases) there is no question of criminality: if anything happened, it would be an approach by the copyright holder (or their estate).

[JimBoyd]

Well, it's like a dozen or so bytes in a Forth primitive here and there because there is no more efficient way to write them in an ITC Forth. Maybe some vaguely remembered ideas from Forth Dimensions. That sort of thing. Believe me, I've gone over my code many times looking for ways to make it more efficient.
The word T&S uses the same numbers as Blazin' Forth so blocks on this system are compatable with Blazin' Forth blocks, but the source is different.
As for the system design, It is not like the other Forths for the Commodore 64 that I've used.

[BigEd]

Sounds like there's no great problem there from a copyright perspective.

[JimBoyd]

Thanks! I appreciate all the help.

[speculatrix]

BTW, interesting debates going on over at the Open Source Initiative.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/0 ... r_resigns/

General consensus seems to be that there are just too damn many types of licence around and the situation is a mess. Some people feel that just three - AGPLv3, the LGPLv3, and Apache v2 - are enough. Looks like there may be attempts at pruning, so when choosing a licence it might pay to adopt one that's going to be widely recognised for some time to come.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

speculatrix wrote:

BTW, interesting debates going on over at the Open Source Initiative.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/01/0 ... r_resigns/

General consensus seems to be that there are just too damn many types of licence around and the situation is a mess. Some people feel that just three - AGPLv3, the LGPLv3, and Apache v2 - are enough. Looks like there may be attempts at pruning, so when choosing a licence it might pay to adopt one that's going to be widely recognised for some time to come.

Never underestimate the ability of a lawyer to throw a wrench into the works. My take on the article is this man Lindberg is trying to make an end-run around the OSI.

Lawyers mucking up things was a problem in Shakespeare's day, who had one of his characters famously suggest that lawyers be killed (from the play Henry VI). History doesn't record if the Immortal Bard himself hated lawyers.

[speculatrix]

Indeed, but note the comment that the OSI itself recognizes that there are too many licence types.

(BTW, autocorrect on this iPad changed licence to ‘lice cells’.)

[cjs]

BigEd wrote:

if you feel there might be something mixed into your work which you think might be copyright by someone and for which you don't have a license...you might publish anyway but with an annotation. For example you might be able to say that the original author could not be reached, that you believe no economic harm is being done, and you offer to withdraw your mixed work if you hear from the copyright holder. This is relatively common.... In the case of old source code (and many other cases) there is no question of criminality: if anything happened, it would be an approach by the copyright holder (or their estate).

Sadly, this is no longer the case. Traditionally copyright violation has been a civil matter, but ACTA proposed criminalizing it. Japan is the only country I'm aware of that has ratified the treaty and passed laws implementing it, but it has already arrested people for "illegal file sharing," which has included someone who made available via BitTorrent a version of a video that anybody could watch for free on YouTube.

I don't think that someone sharing copyrighted computer code that is several decades old is likely to be caught up in this mess, since typically the copyright owners are not interested in enforcing the copyright and, at least currently, law enforcement organizations don't seem to be chasing down copyright violations without prompting by the copyright owners. But it makes sense to me even in such cases to protect yourself and your own code to some degree, for example by ensuring that you're not putting code for which you don't have a license into your GitHub account, but instead placing it on some separate server. (This would hopefully prevent clearly non-infringing material from being collateral damage in an account shutdown due to a copyright enforcement action.) But of course IANAL, don't take that as legal advice but instead as advice to contact a lawyer for real legal advice, etc. etc.

While it's common for people to make old code available in the way you said, it's also common for derivative works simply to supply a program that modifies the original work and make the end user download the original work and run the program to do the modification. One example of this is ROM 4X, a modified version of the Apple IIc ROM code.

[BigEd]

Indeed, there are various tactics available, depending on how worried you are and how much effort you're prepared to take. (And what the stakes are.) And indeed, the legal situation is subject to change, and probably in bad ways - but that said, ACTA seems to have died on the vine.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

speculatrix wrote:

(BTW, autocorrect on this iPad changed licence to ‘lice cells’.)

Your iPad needs to wash its hair more often.

[kveroneau]

I came across the article this evening stating that Lee Davison passed away, I wasn't too active and/or I somehow missed the article when I was a bit active a few years back. My apologizes for not seeing them. I was a bit in shock and didn't expect to see those posts, my heart goes out to his family and friends.

Earlier this year I created a 6502 Simulation Toy project with a bunch of fun and educational components for hobbyist and students alike. This project includes a pending version of EhBASIC out of the box which can be launched and used fully featured with almost zero effort. I sent an email to the creator asking him permission to include this in the final educational product, but at least now I know why I haven't received a reply. Which is what brings me to next point, what should I do now? I'd personally love to include EhBASIC in my final software which will be for educational purposes, but that also means that I cannot sell it with it included, as I was hoping to turn this into something big which could be used in education, by hobbyist, and anyone with some interest in computer science. One thought is to have it as a separate download from the main product, but it won't make it accessible. The other thought is that when/if the product ever goes commercial, that a portion of the proceeds go to a good cause which the community could agree upon in commemoration of Lee Davison. I am really open here on how to proceed. At the very least I will update the information in the program itself to note this and to give some respect in the about box. In theory if this project is successful, Lee Davison will be immortalized in a way, as a lot more people than he could ever anticipate will have the chance to try his software. Perhaps I'm getting just a bit ahead of myself there, my apologizes.

I made another post in the simulator section of the forum, but if you'd rather just read all about it and watch videos of how EhBASIC works within the software, you can check it out on the website I put up for it recently here: http://www.hackers-edge.com/

[drogon]

kveroneau wrote:

I'd personally love to include EhBASIC in my final software which will be for educational purposes, but that also means that I cannot sell it with it included, as I was hoping to turn this into something big which could be used in education

EhBASIC is an annotated and enhanced version of a disassembly of Microsoft Basic.

At that level, I think it's somewhat cheeky of Lee (when he was alive) to try to sell it or even arrange commercial licenses for it - It wasn't his to sell in the first place - unless he somehow obtained a resell license from Microsoft themselves.

I'd go ahead and sell your thing - If anyone is going to come after you, it's Microsoft, but be aware that putting BASIC in education in these enlightened days may not go down well - you're up against some very big players pushing scratch, python, and others on other small computer systems and desktop PCs and tablets. Every high school kid in Scotland gets an iPad for example...

-Gordon

[kveroneau]

drogon wrote:

EhBASIC is an annotated and enhanced version of a disassembly of Microsoft Basic.

That is very interesting actually, I've only skimmed the pages on EhBASIC and wasn't aware of this fact. This does make it's inclusion in my program a bit easier to swallow.

drogon wrote:

I'd go ahead and sell your thing - If anyone is going to come after you, it's Microsoft, but be aware that putting BASIC in education in these enlightened days may not go down well - you're up against some very big players pushing scratch, python, and others on other small computer systems and desktop PCs and tablets. Every high school kid in Scotland gets an iPad for example...

I feel the only reason Microsoft would try to come after me for this inclusion, is firstly, if they are even aware of what EhBASIC even is, as I wasn't even aware that it was a sly disassembly of MS BASIC, which is some fun history in itself. I am also quite aware that BASIC is the language I grew up with to learn programming, however, the focus on this product isn't BASIC, I am including it more or less literally for "educational purposes", a historic element to understand how these old BASICs worked at a low-level to understand how a computer processes and handles data at it's lowest level most users of modern CPUs could never easily see. The main highlight of this product is the ability to easily see how memory is organized, potentially optimized, and just learning how a CPU works at this low-level. The program I am developing focuses more of the C programming language, and includes a working cc65 C library for the simulator allowing people to get their hands dirty with a language that can be a bit more complicated to experiment with on real hardware, as it's not that easy to fully understand C at first, and how various memory-based exploits are done, and how the stack works among other interest C concepts. If you recall trying to learn C, I'm sure you ran into many crashes, and in the older days, those crashes sometimes meant having to reboot the entire computer as there was no memory protection back then.

So, I'll include for "historic educational purposes", and if Microsoft thinks they need to get their lawyers on it, then I can easily remove it from the product without any negative side-effects.

I do kind of want to start a new topic now discussing what people think of modern people learning programming through languages such as Python, Scratch, Ruby, among other languages. Guess Java is now out the door in schools these days? With languages like those mentions, a lot of computer science concepts are just lost, like who is going to code the next native program if all new programmers only use Python and Scratch, and have never touched a compiler? Are these types of programmers destined to be replaced by AI first as the industry will lack those able to grasp how a compiled language works? Languages like Python, Scratch, among others have so many safety nets to otherwise protect the coder from themselves. But I digress, this should be in another topic not here.

Regardless, thank you very much for the reply, this helps a lot in deciding to include it in the program or not.

[BigDumbDinosaur]

kveroneau wrote:

I do kind of want to start a new topic now discussing what people think of modern people learning programming through languages such as Python, Scratch, Ruby, among other languages...

I seem to recall that such discussion occurred in the not-too-distant past.  My take is no one really learns much about how computers work by programming with high-level languages.  There is too much abstraction involved.

The son of a friend of mine does website design using PHP, Javascript, etc.  He is very good at that, but hasn’t a clue as to what is going on behind the metaphoric curtain.  I’ve showed him some 65C816 assembly language and the steps I take to write, assemble, test and debug a program.  He had no idea such a thing existed, his view of software development and much of computing in general being shaped by the education he received in college, constant use of Microsoft Windows, and the IDE he uses in his daily work.  Apparently, assembly language was never mentioned in any of his college courses.

Getting back on-topic (sort of), as Gordon noted, Lee Davison’s EhBASIC was a respin of MS BASIC.  Since MS BASIC is copyrighted software, with a reverse-engineering clause in the license, and since that copyright is current, Lee’s respin is technically a form of infringement.  While it is unlikely Microsoft is going to devote any legal talent to prosecuting an infringement lawsuit on 1970s-era software, you should be aware of your exposure should you bundle EhBASIC with your product.

Speaking of MS BASIC, it’s worth noting that Microsoft’s copyright covers their rendition of a BASIC interpreter, not the language itself.  I’m sure you know BASIC is the intellectual property of Dartmouth College.  Although I have not exhaustively researched the matter, my understanding is Dartmouth never formally authorized the use of BASIC outside of their environment.  Such a thing could be used against Microsoft were they to pursue infringement action against a user of EhBASIC...the Microsoft copyright could be voided if Dartmouth were to claim infringement.  That said, who has the kind of money it would take to work that angle. 

[barnacle]

Curious that while Pagetable https://www.pagetable.com/?p=46 shows how to rebuild several early versions of MS Basic, and include the (C) Copyright Microsoft text in its various incarnations, they don't mention the subject of copyright at all.

Neil