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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. "
Oh wow, I still remember the first time I saw MacPaint-- there was nothing like it. Bill Atkinson did a superb job, shoehorning all those features so they could run in 128K of RAM.
He just barely made it-- I remember trying to find how much memory my desk accessory could use while MacPaint was running, and when you did a "print preview", the available RAM went down to like 1800 bytes! Yikes!
Funny how Macs now lack the equivalent of MacPaint.
That was kind of the point with the concept of "copyright": that the copyrighted work in question would enter the public domain after a short time in order to enrich society as a whole.
What *should* be happening, at the very least, is that a full copy (including source and binaries, in the case of software) of any copyrighted work be placed in government escrow so that it can be released to the public after the copyright expires (which should be about five or ten years, in the case of software).
How sad that copyright law has been twisted so terribly by the rich and powerful to the detriment of human civilization.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
So how long until that copyright will expire?
A lot longer than the code will be relevant.
And if we're "lucky" Doom 3 will be the last one... One of the consequences of id's merger with Zenimax is that the latter have no interest in sharing their tech with the outside world. Word has it that Carmack will "petition" them to release the Doom 3 source. It feels like the end of an age.
How many great companies have been destroyed by bad mergers.
The Activision/Blizzard merger has already caused one of the biggest PR disasters in the history of the gaming company we considered one of the best in the world before - not only to work at, but to deal with as a customer. The Zenimax/ID merger is rapidly destroying the soul of perhaps one of the most innovative companies in the history not only of gaming but of software as a whole. ID for their genre-redefining (and in at least one case CREATING) work ranks right up there with the original Sierra/Online as one of the companies that created the foundations on which the modern gaming industry was built.
I remember when John Carmack said of the reason for the first doom1 source release that he did it "because Linux gives me a woody"...
It's sad to see truly great companies get swallowed up into corporate hiveminds and lose the wonder that they once held for us.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
No one is required to ensure that something is of any *use* when copyright expires on it, so your argument about binaries doesn't hold water.
The comparison I was thinking of personally was film making - lots of 'source' material involved in making a film that will never see the light of day when copyright expires on it, especially with more modern digital and animated films (the model and textures for Shrek for example).
You don't have to release it, but you never asserted copyright protections on it either. It doesn't seem unreasonable to tie the two together -- you can keep something secret OR assert copyright protections, but not both.
We do exactly the same thing with patents. You can have trade secrets and even take legal action to protect them and prevent them from being improperly shared. OR you can have patent, which makes the design public, but allows you to prohibit use of the design even in independent implementations. But you can't patent something and keep it a secret.
It wont run on an iphone - its in pascal. Emulation or non-native/transpiled programs are forbidden, i heard.
You know what's more annoying than fanbois? Hatebois. Get a fucking life, moron.