Re: Relating to my recent discussions with Steve Wozniak.

[BLuRry <brendan.robert@gmail.com>]

> > You gotta stop being so black & white about the issue....  otherwise it becomes like U.S. politics.
> 

Maybe I am the type to ride the lightening without underwear on, but in the past 5 years neither M$ or Apple have tracked me down in my sleep for including the //e and ][DB roms with JACE.  No cease/desist.  Nor has Asimov ever gone away.  Quite simply, if you're not threatening their profit margin then they simply won't care.  They'll lose money paying a lawyer for the time spend sending nastygrams over something that they cannot make money on in the first place.

I know we saw some insanity from Atari recently going after homebrewers and such but really that's because Atari was bought by a company hoping to maximize profit off of their old games catalog -- and anything playing retro Atari games suddenly became a threat.  Their lawyers were cease-and-desist happy for a while but suddenly it became too expensive for them to try to target everyone that put the word Atari on their webpages.   Since Apple doesn't really own any retro software of any specific novel interest (other than collectors and vintage retro nuts like us) it is not worth their time or energy to drum up interest in old stuff.  They're far too busy chasing after the next big thing.

If you really have a moral issue with it, then ship sans roms and provide a very easy mechanism for people to put their (hopefully legitimately obtained) roms in.  Either way just make a decision and stick with it.  :-D  I don't think anyone will hold either decision against you.  There are great reasons for going either way.

-B