On 20 Mar 2007 at 16:06, Jim Leonard wrote: Copying the CD-ROM itself I understand to be verboten, as it's copyrighted as a "collection". However, since the notice makes it abundantly clear that the contents themselves can be freely distributed, why not just log ontto one of the many mirror sites and download the whole shootin' match and burn your own CD? Cheers, Chuck

On 20 Mar 2007 at 17:11, Jim Leonard wrote: It's a nested leech. WC-Simtel leeched off of the software authors to create their for-sale collection. Can you imagine that tt one time, long ago, it was considered to be good etiquette to let authors know that they're stuff was being redistributed for profit? Now THAT'S FUNNY! Cheers, Chuck

On 3/20/07, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote: I received more than one free CD-ROM from one of those vendors long ago (Walnut Creek?), because their policy was to give authors free copies of the collection upon request. This was back before any mortals could afford CD burners (they existed, but were $5K and up), so it was a nice perk. I have always written my stuff to give away to the widest audience (via Fred Fish in the Amiga world, or patches via Usenet comp.* groups, etc.) I never got bent out of shape because someone with a larger disk than I could afford and access to pressed-CD mastering equipment siphoned off an archive I contributed to and sold the results for a profit - a) it got the software into more hands, and b) it got a lot of interesting software into _my_ hands without trying to slurp it down a 2400 bps pipe onto a 40MB disk. We didn't always get informed personally that our stuff ended up on an archive, but if someone went and siphoned off Simtel or one of the Amiga repositories, it was announced in the title of the disk and one could go look. I never felt the need to go the shareware route, etc., so I never felt like I was getting "ripped off". Some other people must have felt differently. -ethan