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MacPaint Source Code Released to Museum
gbooch writes "The Computer History Museum, located in Mountain View, California, is not only a museum of hardware but also a museum of software. Today, with the permission of Apple, the Museum has made available the original source code of MacPaint.
MacPaint was written by Bill Atkinson, a member of the original Macintosh development team. Originally called MacSketch, he based it on his earlier LisaSketch (also called SketchPad) for the Apple Lisa computer. Bill started work on the Macintosh version in early 1983. "
Uh... id has been doing this for years. And id doesn't wait 27 years to do it, either.
ftp://ftp.idsoftware.com/idstuff/source/
It has been mentioned a few times here in /., but http://folklore.org/ has a great collection of short stories about MacPaint. Worth the reading for every geek out there
If that's in the source, I think at one time Apple had some testing harness that sent random click events to programs to see if it would crash. That might be what is meant by the monkey.
Explanation: it was a reference to Apple's automated testing framework, as per the zero-score reply you can't see:
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=Monkey_Lives.txt
I've looked at the source and it shows many good programming traits, like variable and procedure naming that makes sense, separation of concerns (each procedure is short and does only one or two things; and it's procedural), etc. The code is very easy to follow. It shows that good programming is more about the programmer than the programming language.
This is perhaps the most ill-constructed wealth of ignorance posted on Slashdot for a while, at least without original intent to be tardy.
Copyright protects creative works. Whereas published works may have required copyright notice on the work (before 1989), or deposit with the Library of Congress, unpublished works have never required a copyright notice for protection. If you created it, you have the copyright on it, and can take protective action against others distributing copies of your work.
Patents protect exclusive distribution of inventions. We do not do the exact same thing with patents. Patents allow you to take legal action and prohibit competitors from making infringing products.
Trade secrets are secrets as long as they are kept secret, but 'infringing' products are not actionable. You have not publicly declared that you invented something, so if someone else invents it they can use it too (and might even be able to patent it if you haven't created prior art implementing your invention). There are only legal covenants (and criminal liability in some states) to prevent employee disclosure, theft, or espionage. Trade secrets can include non-copyrightable or non-patentable things such as the formula for Red Bull.
Software, which is currently under discussion, can have all: patentable (think Amazon one-click checkout patent), under copyright (as the Amazon web server software is, even if undisclosed), and contain trade secrets (such as server cloud optimization routines to speed processing).
If you work for Apple and released the source code to 1984's Macintosh File System you would be breaching your non-disclosure trade secret agreement with Apple. The disclosed software would still be covered by copyright, and features or inventions implemented in the software may be covered by patents too. Many software patents are so vague in their description (merely describing the end result or user interface) that the actual implementation in code may indeed be a trade secret too.