[DECtalk] thinking of legal gray areas with licenses

[joshknnd1982 at gmail.com]

I am inclined to agree with your last statement. No one cares enough to bother. And no one will ever care enough to bother. They could go after me for using word perfect 5.1 and lotus 1-2-3 in a dos emulator on my computer. They won't. no one cares enough to bother. We are quite safe using decTalk and making free sapi5 and other versions of it. just don't sell or profet from it and you'll be fine. Its free abandonware. Just like my installation of word perfect 5.1 for dos which was a commercial product with similar licenses to decTalk. 


-----Original Message-----
From: Dectalk <dectalk-bounces at bluegrasspals.com> On Behalf Of Tom Morris
Sent: Sunday, March 19, 2023 22:50
To: DECtalk <dectalk at bluegrasspals.com>
Subject: Re: [DECtalk] thinking of legal gray areas with licenses

On Sat, Mar 18, 2023 at 11:36 AM <joshknnd1982 at gmail.com> wrote:
>  I think at this point decTalk is more like abandoned freeware and or shareware. I guess its like freeware or shareware with source code.

There's really nothing "grey" about it. The code is copyrighted intellectual property. It was shared by someone who had legal access to it as part of their job, in violation of their employee agreement.

It might be possible for someone to convince the copyright holders to release it under an open source license or to provide free binary licenses like was done with the VMS Hobbyist program, but, as far as I'm aware, none of that has happened.

Whether or not anyone is going to pursue offenders is a separate matter. It's possible that no one cares enough to bother.

Tom

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