Date   : Tue, 05 Mar 1996 11:34:56 +0000 (GMT)
From   : Robin Watts <Robin.Watts@...>
Subject: Re: Acorn ROMs

In some randomly numbered message, Mark Cooke said:
:
:Hey - I just had an interesting thought - maybe the marketing guys at 
:Acorn are just waiting for some of us to finish up our emulators - and
:then they're going to try to sell us licenses for the roms. Hell - that'd 
:really pull in the dough for them ;-)

Last September, as we prepared 6502Em for release, I approached Acorn
about getting a license to distribute the BBC ROMs. They told me: "We
consider there still to be considerable IPR value within these
ROMs. Therefore we would want to make a charge for them. Based on
projected sales of around 1000 copies, at 5 pounds a copy we would
want a one time up front license fee of 5000 pounds."

Obviously this was out of our range, so we had to look for other ways
of legally supplying the ROMs. Our solution was to provide a program
that takes the ROM images out of 65Host, Acorns own freely
distriubuted BBC emulator.

To get access to other ROM images (Master, Compact, Electron etc) the
users need to own the original machines...

Now, for quite a while I was livid about this sum of money, but it was
explained to me by a friend at Acorn. Apparently parts of RISC OS
(such as the VDU queue) etc share essentially the same concepts, and
so allowing the BBC OS to be distributed for free would put a low
value on certain parts of RISC OS, "in a very real, and legally
binding sense".

Taken like this, you can understand Acorns caution. It is a great
shame though...

Robin
A 9th Graders homework - Using a given word in context:             Robin
Watts
Stain: "My mother-in-law stopped by and I axed her do
        you plan on stain for dinner?"