Hi (again) John,
I wonder if it would be possible to get the source code (as opposed to
the assembly listings) for your test & checkout programs? I'd
like
to run them on my simulator, but I think it would be slightly easier to
start from the source code than it would to start from the assembly
listings.
By the way, I notice that your online materials don't address copyright
or licensing questions for your software. (Of course, you may
have
discussed this in the PDFs, and I may simply have been too dopey to
notice.) The implication I get from your writings is that you
want to
encourage people to use your materials, but without explicitly
addressing copyright/licensing issues, the software can't be legally
used. (Not that most people would care, of course. Most
people assume
that anything they find on the internet can be used for anything they
like, even though legally this is false.) The problem is that the
default position under law is that if there is no copyright notice,
then the author (yourself) holds the copyright, and nobody can legally
use it without a license from you, until 75 years after you die.
But
since you don't specify any licensing terms, then nobody can use it
without coming to you for your explicit permission. The same
comments
probably apply to the electrical schematics, but I haven't really
looked at those yet.
At the risk of offering advice where none was asked, I'd suggest that
you do one of the following. Either
1) Explicitly add comments at the top of each software source
file
saying something like "I, the author of this work, John Pultorak, place
this work in the public domain"; or else
2) Explicitly add copyright notices to the top of each source
file,
and then explicitly specify the licensing terms. For example,
your
licensing terms could be "Anybody is free to use and modify this
software for any purpose, as long as the copyright notice is not
removed." Or (like me) you could use the GNU General Public
License
(GPL); if so, you can simply cut-and-paste the copyright/licensing poo
from the tops of my source files.
Sorry for the legalese, but it's the kind of question it's easy to
forget about unless somebody mentions it to you, and by the time you it
bites you, it's too late to do anything about it.
Sorry for ranting,
Ron
P.S., for an example of confusion caused by not
correctly addressing these issues, look at the "Terms of Use" page of
the MIT website. All of the Apollo docs reproduced there were
created
under U.S. government contract, and therefore cannot be copyrighted,
and hence are in the public domain. (Furthermore, the act of
scanning
the documents does not create a new copyright, nor did MIT scan all of
the docs that are available there.) Yet the MIT "terms of use"
claims
a copyright on the docs, and says that you can make one copy for your
own personal use, but that's all, and certainly can't redistribute any
of the docs. Pure, confusing nonsense.