LMI Lambda?

[Liam Proven]

On 9 February 2017 at 18:06, geneb <geneb at deltasoft.com> wrote:
> If you don't (at least) have the official distribution media, then
> TECHNICALLY you'd be violating the copyright.  Otherwise, it's nonsense.


AIUI -- and IANAL -- this is correct, yes.

The issue here is not running the software, it's _owning_ the
software. This sometimes ties in to ownership of the vendor's hardware
it was intended to run on.

Apple is slightly different -- the licence for Mac OS X stipulates
that you're only allowed to run it on Apple-branded hardware. This is
somewhere between rare and unique, though, and it has recently been
relaxed slightly to permit use of hypervisors.

But otherwise, so long as you own the software or a licence thereto,
you can run it on whatever you want, in most cases.

If proprietary firmware or drivers are involved, it's harder still, as
the only way to get a licence for them is to own one of the original
boxes.

That's how it's treated in the emulation scene of old home computers
anyway -- often licences there were scant.

Do you own at least 1 of the original machine? Did you extract its
ROMs or whatever from hardware you possess? And you own original media
for the program you wish to run? Then you have met the terms of any
normal licence and are in full legal compliance, even if the original
hardware and media are in a box in the attic and you're using a
umpteen-gigahertz 42-core machine with a terabyte of RAM to actually
execute the binaries.

Did the author reverse-engineer the original hardware in order to
emulate it, or use publicly-available docs? Then the emulator is clean
and legit, too.


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