On 9 February 2017 at 18:06, geneb <ge...@deltasoft.com> wrote: > If you don't (at least) have the official distribution media, then > TECHNICALLY you'd be violating the copyright. Otherwise, it's nonsense.
AIUI -- and IANAL -- this is correct, yes. The issue here is not running the software, it's _owning_ the software. This sometimes ties in to ownership of the vendor's hardware it was intended to run on. Apple is slightly different -- the licence for Mac OS X stipulates that you're only allowed to run it on Apple-branded hardware. This is somewhere between rare and unique, though, and it has recently been relaxed slightly to permit use of hypervisors. But otherwise, so long as you own the software or a licence thereto, you can run it on whatever you want, in most cases. If proprietary firmware or drivers are involved, it's harder still, as the only way to get a licence for them is to own one of the original boxes. That's how it's treated in the emulation scene of old home computers anyway -- often licences there were scant. Do you own at least 1 of the original machine? Did you extract its ROMs or whatever from hardware you possess? And you own original media for the program you wish to run? Then you have met the terms of any normal licence and are in full legal compliance, even if the original hardware and media are in a box in the attic and you're using a umpteen-gigahertz 42-core machine with a terabyte of RAM to actually execute the binaries. Did the author reverse-engineer the original hardware in order to emulate it, or use publicly-available docs? Then the emulator is clean and legit, too. -- Liam Proven • Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lpro...@cix.co.uk • Google Mail/Talk/Plus: lpro...@gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven • Skype/LinkedIn/AIM/Yahoo: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 • ČR/WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal: +420 702 829 053
