Back When Synths Were Beautiful

[The Dong]

Paul Maddox wrote:
> Who knows, ultimately they have refused to pass any information to my
> friend and he's doing what he can. He's also been told that is *NOT*
> allowed to sell or distribute his OS if it contains any of their
> original code.

10 years ago, I might have said the likes of Sir Maddox and friends were 
a tiny speck of insignificance, the mad professors who only show up as a 
laugh to fill a spot every 20 years on the lunch time news. But these 
days there are so many engineer/science/hackers that have come out of 
the woodwork, it is more frequent to find exactly the hack you seek than 
to not be able to find any info.

They could just pull the same stunt as our trusted leadership and 
accidentally mislay or leave the code on a bus...

It works for them ;)

Frankly, if I fixed something I'd have no qualms about releasing either 
the information to do it, or the whole thing, unless I was a business 
with much to lose in fannying about with legal procedure in the grey 
areas of legalese guff.

Depending on your location, reverse engineering is NOT illegal, nor is 
distributing the information to modify. In fact, I doubt anyone is at 
real risk of coming a cropper by reverse engineering or modifying any 
commercial product. The threats are usually enough to discourage most 
from disobeying, but the legal system permits investigation and 
experiment in most areas, as to forbid this is ultimately to forbid the 
progression of scientific discovery.

In other words: that EULA is worthless twaddle ;)

What I'm trying to say is that everyone has a right to investigate, 
discover and modify whatever the hell they want, whether paid for or 
free, and only shit-bag companies, like Apple, try every trick in the 
book to try and prevent this form of progression. The internet has 
allowed one (or a group of) 'crackpot' bedroom scientist or hackers 
achievements to be easily transmitted to the world and implemented on 
huge scale. Unfortunately, this un-business model of end user connection 
is even more efficient in operation than the average corporate 
management structure and information traffic jams.

Leaving big business lurching blindly for legal poo to quash the very 
stuff they should be embracing as the inevitable (and unstoppable) future.

imho, sort of.
Yadda, yadda.