Subject: I HAVE to be careful (was Re: VIRUSes)

From: sla at fast.ucsc.edu (Steve Allen)
Date: 17 Mar 92 21:36:51 GMT

In article <1992Mar17.165439.5812 at nrao.edu> cflatter at nrao.edu writes:
>I hope that we are not going to see the free interchange of astronomical
>software inhibited by virus hysteria spreading from the DOS world.

I love the idea of free interchange of astronomical software, but the original
posting left too many questions unanswered.
--Who is the original poster?  I've never seen him before in this group.
He seems not to have mastered the use of the USENET yet.  How dare I endanger
the people who rely daily on the software that I own and maintain here?
How sure am I that our system managers have patched the NFS bugs or
the integer divide by zero bug on all Sparcs networked to me?
--The program says it is for Sparcs.  It is a binary.  It has no docs,
no man pages.  I would like know what version of the OS it was built under,
what shareable libraries it may try linking with.
--If it does turn out to be useful (and I expect that it does) what do I do
if I want to put it on a DecStation or a RS/6000?  Can I have the source?
Does the original poster consider this as a teaser for some future commercial
product?  Is the software copyrighted?  Am I permitted to freely redistribute
the binary or would that place me and Lick at risk for some legal action?
_______________________________________________________________________________
Steve Allen          | That was the equation!         |   sla at helios.ucsc.edu
UCO/Lick Observatory | Existence!...Survival must     | If the UC were opining,
Santa Cruz, CA 95064 | cancel out programming! -- Ruk | it wouldn't tell me.