re: MS Office [ was Re: Adaptec AHA-2940 and Linux ]

[TMatsumu@example.com]

Form: Reply
Text: (16 lines follow)
I don't think those types of policies will hold much weight.  One of the 
policies MS recently dropped to make peace with the Justice dept. was the 
strict NDA's on betas which 3rd party independent developers had to sign, in 
that they couldn't discuss the product for 2 years after the product 
shipped.

I think there's a lot to learn from looking at source code, ideally 
documented well and made available properly.

In DOS, there were some not so well behaved programs that actually wrote 
data to their own .exe's, so sometimes you almost had to run debug on the 
.exe to see what values were getting set, and in a sense that is looking 
under the hood of a possible proprietary program.  Also, so is looking at a 
text batch file, no??


Original text: (25 lines follow)
>From owner-tlug@example.com, on 5/29/96 4:47 PM:
>>>>> "TMatsumu" == TMatsumu  <TMatsumu@example.com> writes:

    TMatsumu> Form: Reply Text: (11 lines follow) If you have
    TMatsumu> unlimited time, you can look under the hood of binary
    TMatsumu> files.  Andrew Schulman did that with DOS, Netware, and
    TMatsumu> later Windows, and Matt Peitrick did that with windows
    TMatsumu> before he started working at MS.

Unfortunately, I hope to use my knowledge to contribute to the
freeware movement.  If I ever use "sourcer" to look under the hood of
a proprietary program, I am forever prohibited from working on (ie,
contributing any code to) a similar project for the FSF, for example.
That's RMS's policy, which may be overly conservative, not law, as far
as I know.  After all, he has a huge empire to protect: in terms of
number of programs, not units in use, there are far more programs
available under the Copyleft than under MS's copyright.  I could also
lie about it, I suppose.

-- 
                           Stephen John Turnbull
University of Tsukuba                                        Yaseppochi-Gumi
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences  http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp/
Tennodai 1-1-1, Tsukuba, 305 JAPAN                 turnbull@example.com

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