On Thu, 25 Nov 2004, John Foust wrote: So as Erik suggested, can we take his 5 volumes, "assemble" them into one DVD, and sell that? :) -- Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ International Man of Intrigue and Danger http://www.vintage.org [ Old computing resources for business || Buy/Sell/Trade Vintage Computers ] [ and academia at www.VintageTech.com || at http://marketplace.vintage.org ]

The question asked "ethical", not "legal". They are very different for a lot of people (and neither is a subset of the other, for many, such as me - there are illegal things I consider ethical and legal things I consider unethical.) To answer the original question, for my own values of "ethical": maybe, depending largely on the conditions under which the data in question were distributed. For example, if the data travels under a license like one of the common open-source code licenses, I see no ethical problem with it whatever. If distributing the CD involves violating an applicable NDA, on the other hand, I generally have much ethical problem with it. And there's a lot of grey area in between. /~\ The ASCII der Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse(a)rodents.montreal.qc.ca / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B

Jerome Fine replies: I would appreciate a comment on RT-11 distributions. At present (with a single exception), all RT-11 distributions are still copyright. At the moment, there are a number of RT-11 distributions at: http://www.classiccmp.org/PDP-11/RT-11/dists/ which are mostly compressed bootable images of a single RT-11 distribution. They include the binary V05.03 of RT-11 image which is the oldest RT-11 distribution allowed by Mentec under the hobby license program which was arranged by Bob Supnik over 5 years ago when DEC was still DEC before it was purchased by Compaq. That hobby license allowed V05.03 of RT-11 to be used by hobby users under what has now become the SIMH emulator. Mentec (as far as I know) presently allows and has no objection to running V05.03 of RT-11 and earlier (along with associated layered products of the same time period) under the SIMH emulator. Please assume that this statement to be true for the rest of this e-mail! Note that at present, except for this single exception (under which the user is responsible for obtaining the RT-11 distribution by themselves along with any help that is required), ALL RT-11 distributions can be legally run ONLY if an RT-11 user has an RT-11 license for a minimum of $ US 900 and an RT-11 distribution for a minimum of $ US 1600. One of the files there, RT11DV10.ISO.zip is a CD collection of 13 different RT-11 distributions from V01-15 to V05.03 of RT-11. While it can be estimated it took between 500 and 1000 hours to set up the ISO file (which is also bootable under V05.03 of RT-11), it seemed appropriate to make the ISO file available for FREE as long as it was being downloaded and burned by the the user. QUESTION: If an RT-11 user were to request a copy of the CD to be burned for them (along with a nice fancy label), is it reasonable to charge for the CD and if so, what would you feel should be the maximum charge? ($ US 5, $ US 10 or maybe even $ US 30 - note that no more than a dozen copies would be likely to ever be produced since most users would opt to download and burn themselves???) OR should there never be a charge? Just asking??? As far as I understand, all of the distributions on the V1-0 CD qualify for the Mentec hobby license AND they merely duplicate what is generally available (although in a MUCH more convenient manner in one RT-11 partition so that RT-11 users (if there still are any who are interested) can use them much more easily. PLUS, this way these distributions should now NEVER be lost! In addition, even the V05.03 distribution produced by Megan Gentry is NOT self-sufficient by itself since for use with SIMH (at least when I used it) it is missing the system area required (under both SIMH and E11) if a user is to perform the RT-11 command: INITIALIZE DL0: Sincerely yours, Jerome Fine -- If you attempted to send a reply and the original e-mail address has been discontinued due a high volume of junk e-mail, then the semi-permanent e-mail address can be obtained by replacing the four characters preceding the 'at' with the four digits of the current year.