[Coco] Varloc and other software

[Michael Harwood]

I emailed the person the email suggested was a good person to discuss
things with since Curtis is on vacation, and he replied that Mr. Boyle
is indeed gone for a short period and his auto-reply message has the
wrong dates.  I am sure he will reply in due time!  I also did a bit of
an internet search on Greg and from what I have been able to ascertain
he will most likely be fine with us copying Varloc.

The current copyright holders of the Tandy catalogue were at one point
going to release everything into the public domain, but balked at the
last moment due to some their legal department's fears of possible
liability.  Based on this it's my opinion that the spirit of the law
would not be violated if software items in the Tandy catalogue were made
available to the Coco community.

As an example I would offer the PC port of Dungeons of Daggorarth.  The
source code was purchased form the orginal programmer and ported to
Windows.  Everything is perfectly intact - the sounds, the graphics, the
game play, the maps, the name - everything.  The orginal programmers who
wrote the game were honored as they wished and the copyright holders of
the Tandy material seem not to know or care.  It certainly hasn't hurt
anyone monetarily.

I have been somewhat of an pain in the...I mean an advocate for "do the
right thing" by trying your best to contact the appropriate persons, and
I think that if a legitimate copyright holder communicated that they did
not want their material passed around we should honor their request.

All of this to say that I think passing a copy of Varloc, etc among the
community is not an issue.  Quite the opposite - I think it's a good way
to keep things from getting lost that have value.

I'm getting off my soap box and heading up to dinner now...

;)

Regards,
Michael Harwood

On Wed, 2005-10-19 at 21:34 +0000, johnadonaldson at comcast.net wrote:
> I see a phone number so give him a call.