24 Nov
2004
24 Nov
'04
12:24 a.m.
Tonight, I looked at Volume 5 and in the CD table of
contents (link
above), I see "altair32 Project Altair Emulator.zip" and two other related
listings. As you all know, this is my baby and this person never had the
courtesy to ask my permission to distribute my albeit free software.
Am I crazy here? Should I contact this guy and ask him to remove it?
Should I ask him to place a link to the project page instead? How about
modifying the listing to include a "permission granted" message?
Any thoughts on this?
Hi Rich,
Personally, I don't have a problem when people include my free stuff on a collection
CD which is nominally priced - what they are selling is convienence, not the material
on the disk (which can be freely downloaded).
Perhaps I appreciate this more than most, because I have to download through a dial-up
connection. On a good day I get 25kbps - it takes *HOURS* to download even a few 10s
of megs, let alone a CD or DVDs worth. It is often worth it to me to pay $10-$20 for
a CD containing the material I want rather than to try and keep a connection up long
enough to download it.
Dynacomp is not "some guy", they have been around a LONG time. I have some
titles for
my Altair which were purchased from them back in the late 70s. I think they are a
reasonable company, and given the amount of material on the CD, and the nature of the
target audience, I doubt they are making a "killing" from your material.
I understand that you may feel it is somehow "wrong" that someone makes a bit
of
money from your material, however consider:
- Given the amount of material on the CD, the percentage which can be attributed
to your project is VERY small. The overhead in contacting everyone on the CD,
and handling "royalties" would prohibitive in this case, and such collection
CDs would bascially not be possible.
- Do you really think the price of the CD would go up/down if any one individual
project is added/removed (Given that it is freely available elsewhere).
- As noted above, Dynacomp is a real company - this is no different than Walnut
Creek or other companies which sell compilation CDs. I've seen LOTS of my stuff
on these, and have never been contacted for permission - and it has never bothered
me.
- What about ISPs ... if you don't want anyone to charge for a CD containing your
project, then why do you allow people to charge for a network connection which
is used to deliver your project? - To my mind, this is really not much differece,
both are a form of media.
- I expect part of your reaction is due to the fact that this is Ebay, not so much
the fact that someone has included your project in a collection (which must have
happened many times before).
Should I contact this guy and ask him to remove it?
Do you have a reason why people who purchase this collection should not have easy
access to your project?
Should I ask him to place a link to the project page
instead?
Give that I can find Altair32 with google (or any other search engine) easily on
the first try, then do you really think it necessary to clutter up the Ebay listing
with links (remember, if they do it for you, they should do it for everyone else).
I don't think people normally use Ebay as a "links" resource - the listing
is long
enough as it is...
How about modifying the listing to include a
"permission granted" message?
Again, would this really benefit people looking at this collection? Would it really
benefit you? See above comments regarding the size of the listing. Do you think
anyone who is considering this collection really cares who explicitly have their
permission (given that the material is freely available anyway).
Returning to the ISP analogy, perhaps since people download via their network connection,
all ISPs should be required to explicitly obtain permission from every author of every
project which is available on the net, and display individual "permission
granted"
messages and links for each one (to make sure you are aware of this important detail)
before allowing you to proceed with your connection (where you might access one of those
projects)??? - Would doing so benefit anyone? [Yeah, this is stretching a point,
however most of the people who buyt the CD will not access every project on it either,
it is just a form of bulk media]
Sorry to rant - but this is a pet peeve of mine - CD/DVD collections are one of the fews
ways that I can obtain large "free" files. Authors who prevent their works from
being
included on these are going out of their way to make it very hard for me to obtain them
(to no actual benefit to themselves).
Granted it would be nice if they asked, but this is probably a lot of extra overhead in
the preparation of a large project, and you *DO* make the project freely available to
people who live in the city / have high-speed-connections.
There was a similar thread a few months back, when one of the guys who maintains a site
of archived manuals got upset that another guy was including some of "his"
manuals on a
DVD that he was selling for $30 (and gives to anyone who contributes material which is
how I got it) - Insisting that I download the material prevents me from bring able to
obtain most of the larger manuals (some of which I would really like to get). - Really
annoying, considering that he doesn't have permission from most of the original
authors,
and claims to be preserving them and "making them available" ... but apparently
only to
the "high-speed" elite (but again I rant :-)
Lets have a show of hands ... anyone participatng in this list ever distrbure any
material
without obtaining explicit permission from the orignal author?
Regards,
Dave Dunfield
--
dave04a (at) Dave Dunfield
dunfield (dot) Firmware development services & tools: www.dunfield.com
com Vintage computing equipment collector.
http://www.parse.com/~ddunfield/museum/index.html
24 Nov
24 Nov
5:14 a.m.
Dave Dunfield wrote:
...
There was a similar thread a few months back, when one
of the guys who maintains a site
of archived manuals got upset that another guy was including some of "his"
manuals on a
DVD that he was selling for $30 (and gives to anyone who contributes material which is
how I got it) - Insisting that I download the material prevents me from bring able to
obtain most of the larger manuals (some of which I would really like to get). - Really
annoying, considering that he doesn't have permission from most of the original
authors,
and claims to be preserving them and "making them available" ... but apparently
only to
the "high-speed" elite (but again I rant :-)
If you are referring to the same thread that I recall, I think you have
it wrong. The listmember helps maintain a site of manuals and other
information. When he found that dynacomp was including his work without
having asked permission not having given any references to where he
got the information, the listmember decided to sell a DVD with a
superset of all the information -- the difference being that in his
auction, he clearly stated that all of the information was available on
the net and he'd provide the URLs for all of it free for the asking --
he was very explicit in stating that what he was selling was the
convenience of not having to download and categorize everything.
As I recall it, that person got roasted pretty completely on this list
for what was perceived as too high of a price, despite the fact that his
DVD had more information than the 6 CD's that dynacomp is selling on
ebay which collectively cost way more than the DVD.
Personally, I have invested much more than 1000 hours in my sol work,
maybe 2000 hours -- both the emulator and in scanning and in many cases
meticulously OCR'ing and reformatting the documents so they'd be
searchable and faster to download. For example, in those old proc tech
newsletters they'd often list an assembly language program. OCR'ing
that was tough, but I didn't stop there -- I would clean it up the best
I could, then I'd assemble it and make sure that the hex produced by the
assembler matched the hex that appeared in the listing. I don't have
the time anymore to be that anal about it.
On just about all of the documents on my site I'm violating somebody's
copyright, and I'm more than willing to pull anything from my site that
the original author doesn't want on there, but so far none have (and a
few have been tickled to see their work kept alive).
Dynacomp (Fred Ruckdeschel) irritates me, mostly because of his sneaky
ebay dealings from a few years back (he had a shill bidder on his
auctions and I caught him red handed). He may have been in business for
a long time, but it doesn't have to mean he is ethical.
A piece of me is irritated that dynacomp stands to make money on my and
others efforts. A lot of his volume 6 comes from my sol site. Taken in
whole, though, I can't complain about copyright issues considering that
most of what I've scanned has someone else's copyright imprint on it. I
went to the bother to scan and organize my web site to preserve the
information. This guy is another vector of dissemination.
Finally, in the things that I have OCR'd, I usually put something like
"Copyright (c) 1977 Processor Techonology" or whatever in the PDF
properties when I write out the PDF, but I also include "scanned and
OCR'd by Jim Battle". Some of the people who in the past have
complained about borrowing work uncredited are hosting some of my
documents as evidenced by the PDF tag above, yet they didn't ask me
about it.
The bits want to be free.
5:25 a.m.
On Wed, 24 Nov 2004, Dave Dunfield wrote:
Granted it would be nice if they asked, but this is
probably a lot of
extra overhead in the preparation of a large project, and you *DO* make
the project freely available to people who live in the city / have
high-speed-connections.
Hi Dave.
You make good points overall, but I don't think it takes very much effort
to contact the authors/producers of each contribution on the CD. It's
just a matter of basic courtesy. This would take maybe an hour or two of
e-mail. They're charging $50 per CD. That's about a dollar in production
costs and $49 of profit. Assuming they sell even 5, that's still a good
return for material to which they didn't contribute.
There was a similar thread a few months back, when one
of the guys who
maintains a site of archived manuals got upset that another guy was
including some of "his" manuals on a DVD that he was selling for $30
You're referring to Al. No, he did not refer to the material as "his".
He was mainly objecting to the fact that no credit whatsoever was given.
Do you realize how much time, not to mention MONEY, Al puts into
maintaining and scanning that manual archive so people can download it
for FREE or even SELL compilation CDs? Did I mention MONEY? Not only has
Al put literally thousands(?) of hours into scanning those documents, he
also put THOUSANDS of dollars into acquiring those manuals, and THOUSANDS
of dollars more on acquiring the scanning hardware, and I'm sure the costs
of maintaining his server and internet connection is not insignificant
either. Now, considering the time and effort and actual money Al has put
into that project, I don't think his getting a little bent out of shape
is out of line. A simple, "Thanks to Al Kossow for all his hard work in
making these manuals available" would have been a nice gesture, but even
that courtesy was apparently too much to extend by the compiler. Fie.
(and gives to anyone who contributes material which is
how I got it) -
Insisting that I download the material prevents me from bring able to
obtain most of the larger manuals (some of which I would really like to
get). - Really annoying, considering that he doesn't have permission
from most of the original authors, and claims to be preserving them and
"making them available" ... but apparently only to the "high-speed"
elite (but again I rant :-)
He doesn't "claim" to be preserving them. He *IS* preserving them!
I'm sorry, but have some fucking respect.
Lets have a show of hands ... anyone participatng in
this list ever
distrbure any material without obtaining explicit permission from the
orignal author?
The question is, do you make a practice of this?
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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8:47 a.m.
As I see it, the gist of the arguments for and against the CDR
distribution of free software in this context is:
* Distributor is making money distributing, authors are
not. Largely agreed is that we're not talking lots of money.
* Authors are not getting credit. Largely unspoken is that
free software authors "get paid" from THANKS! from users;
distributor is to some degree (significant or in-) from this
without contributing directly.
* There is an indirect benefit to authors, in that their
works are diseminated largely as intended, the above
notwithstanding.
The problems are largely a matter of DEGREE { If the
distributor was making "substantial" money we'd be more upset;
if distrib. claimed authorship we'd sue; we're HAPPY free
software is diseminated; if the distrib would list (thank)
contributing authors we'd be HAPPIER. };
In other words, this has all the attributes of a never-ending
thread. Think: 10-year-rule, pantone, ...
8:22 a.m.
On Wed, 24 Nov 2004, Dave Dunfield wrote:
> Tonight, I looked at Volume 5 and in the CD table
of contents (link
>above), I see "altair32 Project Altair Emulator.zip" and two other related
>listings. As you all know, this is my baby and this person never had the
>courtesy to ask my permission to distribute my albeit free software.
> Am I crazy here? Should I contact this guy and ask him to remove it?
>Should I ask him to place a link to the project page instead? How about
>modifying the listing to include a "permission granted" message?
> Any thoughts on this?
Having written lots of free software myself dating back 25
years, I look at it as flattery. He's not misrepresenting it,
the cost is nominal, it puts more copies out there, and unless
it's explicitly contrary to copyright restrictions you put
into the source, it's not illegal or unethical. It's a mild
form of semi-immortality, especially if they're stamped CDRs,
which seems to be in innate urge of all earthians (metoo).
It would be nice to acknowledge the many contributors; for a $10
CDR it's probably not worth the time ($) to compile an accurate
list of peoples names, there'd be errors, omissions, etc.
Also, it's clearly only going to a pretty rarefied crowd,
I don't think Walmart will be carrying it.
8:56 a.m.
On Wed, 24 Nov 2004, Tom Jennings wrote:
Having written lots of free software myself dating
back 25
years, I look at it as flattery. He's not misrepresenting it,
...
into the source, it's not illegal or unethical.
^^^^^^^^^
Strike that word misused here. It's obviously not unethical to
him (or he takes the cash and sleeps poorly) but may be to you.
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days inactive
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dave04a＠dunfield.com -
frustum＠pacbell.net -
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vcf＠siconic.com