Expanded S/ware & h/ware morality discussion

[hmag@ozemail.com.au (Terry Allen)]

   I accidentally killed my earlier post regarding this issue, which was
the original thread of the discussion, so here it is again.
   Firstly, I should state that I am against piracy in any form to avoid
flaming, I am just interested for people to post their opinions on this
issue in this group.
   As just about all readers in this group are aware, hardware & software
for the Apple II series are becoming very scarce, except in so-called
'pirated' form. Consequently, many people are putting up archived forms of
both software & hardware on the Internet & online BBS for people to
download for free.
   The only time I do have a problem with this sort of activity is where a
popular program such as say Appleworks V5 as an example is readily
available around the world is put onto such an archive, allowing anybody
easy access to download. To me, this constitutes true piracy as it deprives
both the author & distributor of the program from income & recovering
production costs.
   However, as in other now discontinued computer lines such as Commodore
64, Atari ST etc..., much of this hardware & software is no longer
available, either because the vendor has gone out of business, or because
they simply do not support the computer system any longer. Consequently,
the only way many people are able to obtain software for their systems is
to find it online or second hand, which is not always an easy task.
   Secondly, the people putting these archives online are usually doing so
for free & also incurring significant bandwidth bills to provide such
services. One person recently emailed me, saying (quite rightly) that they
had gone the emulation route now, with copies of software on a PC (others I
know have used Macs), so as they had working copies of their software in
the event that their Apple hardware fails in the future.
   On the Hardware front, many people obtain hardware through gifts, at
garage sales or buy second hand, in a lot of cases without manuals. In this
case, the only case for many is to obtain an online copy of the manual for
their product as the manufacturer does not support the product any longer
or they have gone out of business.
   In the above scenarios, do you consider it piracy, copyright flouting or
service to users of the software/hardware? I believe that where possible,
people should make every effort to obtain the software in question, but
when this is not possible, the only route is to copy it. Additionally, the
currency exchange rate against another country (typically US currency)
almost doubles the price stated where you could buy it, which is where a
lot of shareware principles fall down.
   I'm interested what people think about the above issues & want you to
post them to this group. It should make for an interesting discussion.

-- 
Bye For Now, Terry Allen

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