XX

Millions of dollars are lost each year, and programmers give up heart sick, because of what is laughingly called "piracy."

The following is a classic example of the damage this sort of activity creates. Maurice Randall is an independent programmer, yet he devotes hours each day to his work, while maintaining his auto repair business. One of the products of his fertile mind is a program called "geoFAX." This program allows the owners of Commodore Computers to use their "little" machines as full power fax machines. The cost to purchase this program is low, the quality is high. What follows is the story of what happened, and the reaction of the public.

First, my personal feelings....

There is one thing I wish we'd all get away from, --including me--and that is calling the theft of registered software "hacking," or "piracy." It is simply theft. The damage that is done by such theft is much akin to plagiarism in that it is taking the creative efforts of another person, and taking them without payment to the artist. This has the chilling affect of making programmers back away from any further efforts.

In the case of Maurice, we can only hope that this one incident will not be so discouraging as to deprive us of his continued work. As a writer myself, I am painfully aware of how it feels to find your creativity in someone else's hands, without permission. In this case, though, there was at least no attempt to deny that it was his program.

So, there he was, looking at his own program, sitting on a BBS, as though it were a public domain program. Maurice has decided to handle it in his own way, and we will honor his wishes; but we must make it clear that we do not tolerate, nor will we allow such works in the C=ommodore Forum.

To prevent any such occurrence here, every program that is uploaded to our data base is then down loaded by a staff member and checked. We look to see any signs of "cracking" or other alterations that might raise questions about its origins. We then run the program to make sure a) that it works and b) that is has no viruses. Only then is it moved to our "NEW" file area for public downloading and comment; after a month there it is finally moved to the appropriate data base. We do this to assure our users that the programs here are safe and ready to use--and also that they are not works "borrowed" or "liberated" or in any other way placed there without the consent of their creator. Thus you will find mainly Public Domain ware in our files, and a few shareware, and some demo's, but never--to the best of our abilities--programs that are taking money away from their programmer.

I am sure that almost every member of the C=ommodore Family believes firmly in this policy, and that they, as we, all express our regrets to Maurice about what happened. The best thing we here can do is be sure such a thing does not occur in Com Com.

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