Saved Altair 4K BASIC - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

10 Nov 1998

John Foust &lt;jfoust(a)threedee.com&gt; wrote

...
  There's no
reason for him to surrender the copyright; we could
merely ask for permission to redistribute.  I think the PR aspect
would be a two-edged sword, though - the open source movement
would have a field day with the notion that Gates finally came
around and now allows free distribution of one of his products,
yet I'm sure Microsoft's PR agency could get some mileage from his
benevolence to the classic computer community. 
    From what I've heard, this redistribution idea has made its way around
Microsoft (several times) and suffered bit rot. The potential revenues (zero
or cost of duplication) outweighed the internal costs. I still pitch the
idea to my MS contact occasionally, though.


[  Rich Cini/WUGNET
[   ClubWin!/CW7
[   MCP Windows 95/Windows Networking
[   Collector of "classic" computers
[   http://highgate.comm.sfu.ca/~rcini/classiccmp/
[   http://highgate.comm.sfu.ca/~rcini/pdp11/
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