Re: Apple II Reference Manual ("Red Book")

["Roger Johnstone" <rojaws@es.co.nz>]

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In article <38FC8E67.566AD06A@inetnebr.com>, Roy and/or Janet Miller
<millers@inetnebr.com> wrote:


>Cturley2 wrote:
>> 
>> Dean Jeff wrote (certainly in haste I'd think:
>> 
>> <<By the way, producing a product that does exactly the same thing as
>> another one can be just as illegal as pirating the original product.>>
>> 
>> Jeff, would you like to rethink that perhaps.  The way I read it is that you
>> are saying if some programmer makes another program that does exactly the same
>> thing another one does - it's as illegal as pirating the original product.
>
>Tom, he said "can", not "is". There's a difference. I once owned a
>product called "The Twin" - a clone of Lotus 1-2-3. Adam Osborne had a
>company that had a similar product. Osborne's company was sued
>successfully by Lotus. It did not a similar thing, but the same thing as
>1-2-3.
>
>Hmmm, perhaps IBM should have sued Award and Phoniex, then they would
>still have control of a market that they created.
>
>Roy

-- Alert! This post is on-topic! --

IBM _did_ sue them, but lost. Compaq were one of the first to clone IBM's PC
BIOS, the defence they used was that they used clean-room
reverse-engineering. One programmer disassembled the code, then wrote a
description of exactly what it did but not _how_ it did it. These
instructions were then passed to another programmer who had never laid eyes
on IBM's code, who then wrote a new program to perform the same steps. As a
result the BIOS they created was almost 100% compatible with IBM's, but was
not based on the same code.

Remember the Franklin Apple II clones? Apple discovered that they had copied
a part of the Apple II's ROM directly, and sued them. Franklin admitted in
court that they had copied it, claiming that there was no other way they
could have created a compatible computer. They lost the case and had to stop
making clones. However Video Tech with their Laser clones were never caught
out this way, obviously Franklin were wrong and it was possible to create an
Apple II clone without stealing Apple's code :-)


Roger Johnstone, Invercargill, New Zealand
http://homepages.ihug.co.nz/~rojaws
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