Re: Relating to my recent discussions with Steve Wozniak.

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

On Wednesday, May 2, 2012 10:53:15 AM UTC-5, D Finnigan wrote:
> Chuck Plater wrote:
> > 
> > Unfortunately, when it comes to legal maters, there are no "shades of 
> > grey." 
> 
> You've just revealed to everyone here that you're not a lawyer.

The worst possible outcome is a cease and desist letter, unless you're committing a very serious theft on a rather obvious scale.  It's not black/white/gray thing.  Consider the practicality of how much it costs a lawyer to send a nasty letter vs. the amount of money you're receiving for something using said firmware.  I don't think anything will happen if you are not attracting a massive amount of attention, and the worst that could happen would be relatively insignificant.  

Apple and Microsoft have both been historically very nice to retro enthusiasts.  I haven't seen DosBox or Bochs sites get shut down for having links to Dos 6.22 disk images, though FreeDos is probably more commonly used where possible.  Nor has Microsoft gone after the Wine dev community.  All in all, they've got bigger fish to fry.  I'm not trying to justify the case of putting firmware in, I'm just pointing out the relatively low risk factor of doing so.  I know there have been a lot of debates in many camps about this over the past years, but as the debates stretch on look at the track records of the companies in question and consider if they actually care.

-B