What's the state of copyright surrounding RISC OS?
Pages: 1 2
David Glover-Aoki (1562) 22 posts |
I’m sorry if this is an obvious question but the Wikipedia page is not super clear. There seem to be three entities with some kind of claim or permission to distribute RISC OS – RISC OS Open, Castle Tech, and 3QD. Who owns what? Castle Tech seem to be selling licenses but they don’t say what version you’ll get. Is this commercial licenses for 5? 3QD is selling 6 – is 6 still being developed? Presumably they own the rights to all versions except 5, is that right? If a person wanted to buy out all the copyright holders of RISC OS and and subsequently release the whole damn thing under some friendly license like the GPL, who would they have to talk to? |
David Feugey (2125) 2687 posts |
A bank :) |
Steffen Huber (91) 1945 posts |
You consider GPL to be a friendly licence? I don’t think many would agree. Anyway, the licence issue has been discussed to death. Search the forum for more details. Bottom line: ROOL and Castle did a lot of work to be able to relicence RISC OS under the current Castle licence. It is extemely unlikely that the same would have been possible with a different, more “open” licence, and even more unlikely to happen again. Live with it. |
David Glover-Aoki (1562) 22 posts |
OK whatever, substitute “GPL” for “your preferred license”, but it was a serious question. I just want to know who owns what. |
Steve Pampling (1551) 7904 posts |
That’s because the contributors to the Wikipedia content include people that have a vested interest in it being unclear.
Castle own the overall rights, ROOL was created to continue develop the open source under specific terms and 3QD are the inheritors of the ROL code developed under licence from the then owners PACE
Not at any time in the last decade, so in summary – No.
No, they own the rights to the code developed in RO4.x one version of which had further development (years ago now) and was labelled as RO Six. All work done by ROL (Risc OS Ltd) with regard to GPL – as Steffen suggests, just don’t go there. |
David Glover-Aoki (1562) 22 posts |
Who owns the rights to 3.7 and earlier? (And, as a bonus question, does anyone own the rights to the BBC Micro/Master ROMs?) |
Steve Pampling (1551) 7904 posts |
Always bad to assume, but I suspect the answer is the same people that have the rights to all the other versions except the version(s) built with code developed by ROL. In that latter case the answer is probably complicated. I’m curious why you’re interested in ownership of the rights beyond any interest in retro computing items. |
David Glover-Aoki (1562) 22 posts |
I just want to understand. The situation regarding ownership of the various versions seems spectacularly complicated. |
Timo Hartong (2813) 194 posts |
PhD thesis comming up ?? |
Rick Murray (539) 13351 posts |
I was offline (rural France) from 2002 to 2009. During that time things got really complicated: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/06/17/riscos_dispute/ And then it got ridiculously complicated: http://www.drobe.co.uk/article.php?id=2372&hlt=riscos+ltd And finally: https://www.iconbar.com/articles/3QD_Developments_acquire_RISC_OS_from_RISCOS_Ltd/index1279.html The only conclusion that I draw from all of this is that Castle had a more robust claim to the rights (as ROOL, the source, and an IOMD ROM all exist) but beyond that it is confusion and obfuscation all over the place, and it’s effects are still being felt even all this time later: https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/11/topics/3568?page=4#posts-46239 Anyway, haven’t we already covered this? ;-) https://www.riscosopen.org/forum/forums/12/topics/3002 |
Steve Pampling (1551) 7904 posts |
Understanding more than a small portion is probably impossible, I’ve been around the Acorn scene since the early BBC micro days and I’m not sure I understand that much of it. Some developers at Pace had a private 32 bitting exercise going on and that formed the basis of the Castle release labelled RO5. Much legal yah,boo,sucks from both side about whether Castle were allowed to do any such development(RO5) ensued and along the way Castle played all the aces: they went to Pace, bought the whole lot with Pace retaining the right to continue their work on their set top box use, but essentially Castle owned the lot and ROL were now required to deal with Castle rather than Pace. The yah, boo, sucks stuff continued for a while after1 Meanwhile ROL had continued with RO4.3x and labelled the mostly complete version as RO Six and then faded to obscurity, failed to lodge accounts with Companies house for two years and were delisted as a company. 3QD bought up the RO Six package to continue to use in the emulator package they sell. Any and all development in RO6 remains closed and essentially lost to the rest of the RO user community. In short, who owns what can be expressed as: Since the RO5 stream has no access to the ROL development the matter is irrelevant. 1 Some people still won’t touch RO5 so the definition of a while is flexible. Edit: My, that was long. |
Andrew McCarthy (3688) 573 posts |
Acorn Computer Group → ART → Element 14. RISC OS was sold to Pace – set top box developer and ROL was given the rights to develop RISC OS for the desktop. Castle bought RISC OS from Pace, whilst ROL continued to develop RISC OS. Castle released their own version of RISC OS for the IYONIX PC. Eventually ROL development stopped and ROL was transferred to 3QD. With ROOL RISC OS lives on and the rest is history… Copyright claims, at one point Pace and ROL, subsequently ROL and Castle. Today (ROOL and) Castle. And no doubt 3QD for anything related to their versions.
Morgan Stanley or whoever inherited the intellectual property rights of Acorn Computers. *EDIT to reflect ROOL set-up by comments below. |
Steve Pampling (1551) 7904 posts |
I think that sort of derives from using legal people to carry out a purchase from the owners of record.
Yes, but a nice cathartic session at Easter is probably apt. |
David Feugey (2125) 2687 posts |
… That was the initial question. ROOL and 3QD use RISC OS under licence (ROOL gets it from Castle, 3QD from Pace). They are not the ‘main’ copyright holders of RISC OS. For old OS, it’s not very clear. It would be cool for Castle to give them for free if they own them. But that’s another story. Just for information, ROOL and 3QD are not the only one to have a licence of RISC OS. I believe that Ashiv in France got also a licence of RISC OS… coming from Acorn. They use it in NC like computers sold to Chronobourse, RATP, and for Datacast solutions, all over the world. |
Steve Pampling (1551) 7904 posts |
Are you sure that’s not a Pace era licence? |
Steve Revill (20) 1361 posts |
That was a decent summary from Steve, which looks to be pretty similar to my view of events. One correction I’d make to what’s been said in some of the posts here is that ROOL was not set up by Castle. ROOL was set up by a group of interested and enthusiastic people who wanted to ensure that RISC OS had a future and who believed that neither RISCOS Ltd (ROL) or Castle were in a position to ensure that. We were prepared to give up a significant amount of personal time with no direct compensation to make it happen. It was clear to us having done our due diligence that Castle own the RISC OS IP so they were the people to engage with, whereas ROL were simply a licencee of Pace (then of Castle when they purchased RISC OS from Pace). At ROOL, we have always done our best to be a neutral party in all of the convoluted historical debates and they fortunately all look to be somewhat irrelevant now (or at least they have long ago run out of steam). ROOL’s objective was originally and remains to see RISC OS source code published under a true FOSS licence and for the past fourteen years we have not stopped working towards that objective. If anyone is able to directly support this cause – and I refer back to the original post talking about ‘buy out all the copyright holders’ – then I would strongly advise you get in touch info@riscosopen.org with ROOL. |
Steve Pampling (1551) 7904 posts |
That was my belief so I took a little while to use phraseology that avoided suggesting Castle were the instigators.
It might seem strange but I think Castle agree(d) that they had too much baggage and a third party would do better. |
Steve Revill (20) 1361 posts |
Correct. It was a complex discussion with many factors – that took probably a year or so before ROOL was formed. It’s been a huge journey for everyone involved but it’s paid dividends – look at all the platforms RISC OS has been ported to now. We’ve got a vibrant community forum, our bounty scheme is gradually building momentum, we’ve re-worked, updated and republished a range of associated books, the toolchain is available for a fraction of what it used to cost and the Wakefield Show is just around the corner, with the promise of RISC OS 5.24 being released in time for that! A FOSS licence would be the icing on the cake. :) |
Andrew McCarthy (3688) 573 posts |
#Applause A remarkable effort and thank you, not just to ROOL, but also to those who have contributed. #Applause |
David Feugey (2125) 2687 posts |
No, it was long before the end of Acorn. |
Rick Murray (539) 13351 posts |
Would that be possible? There are parts bsd, parts CDDL… A collection of interacting FOSS licences might be possible (which thankfully precludes GPL), but that said I don’t find the Castle licence to be onerous. It would be better to look at trying to unify the two branches than to worry too much about what the RO5 licence is.
+1E99 ;-) |
Steve Pampling (1551) 7904 posts |
I’m not sure what gain that would be unless the main aim was socio-political. I agree that the current licence is fine at the moment. |
Rick Murray (539) 13351 posts |
To merge in those things present in RISC OS 4/6 that will be of use in RISC OS 5. And I don’t mean rounded edges. ;-) A lot of work appears to have been placed into working on system stability (for better or worse) and Gerph’s general attitude towards TaskWindow seems to be one of barely contained horror. If there is anything in the entirety of ROLtd’s work that could be beneficial, would it not be useful to look to merging it into RISC OS 5, given the distinct lack of plentiful coders working on the OS code, not to mention the whole “reinventing the wheel” thing? It’s not socio-political. I think by now we ought to be beyond that. |
Steve Pampling (1551) 7904 posts |
I can’t help wondering how many of the zero page fixes match up there.
I like the phrase “ought to be” |
nemo (145) 2437 posts |
My 2p’s worth: I’m up to my armpits in RO6 at the moment, and you don’t want any of these ‘latest’ bits. I could post the SWI Handler stack usage but your eyes would gouge themselves out. (Am typing this by feel) API unification is a very good idea. You do not need actual source to achieve that (and in some cases you do not WANT the actual source, believe me). |
Pages: 1 2