LMI Lambda?

[Daniel Seagraves]

> On Feb 9, 2017, at 10:16 AM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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.

I started answering Gene with this:

Even having a clean official distribution doesn’t automatically grant a license to use it, and I certainly wouldn’t be able to distribute it. Speaking of which, I don’t know what the original license terms were - They may not have been transferrable. They may even have had a specific requirement that only authorized machines can use the software, like Apple’s OS X license.

But while I was typing that, Liam’s mail came in, so...

> 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.

See above - I don’t know what the original license terms were. They may have had a clause like this.

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

And there’s the rub, because...

> Do you own at least 1 of the original machine?

Nope. I’ve never even SEEN the machine in real life.

> 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.

Can’t even say this.