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Subject: Re: And I'll pay $200 for porting Fritz to linux :)

Author: KarinsDad

Date: 09:50:36 08/25/99

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On August 25, 1999 at 01:50:26, Micheal Cummings wrote:

>On August 25, 1999 at 01:43:16, Keith Kitson wrote:
>
>>I reckon perhaps the word hacking is an unfortunate use of the word here.
>>
>>It sounds more dynamic than just 'creating an interface' between two programs,
>>which is probably what is really being requested in this instance.
>>
>>Keith
>
>either way doing without the programmers permission, or altering any program for
>that matter without the programmers permission is illegal.

This is incorrect. If I write an interface to send data to an Excel spreadsheet,
it is perfectly ok. The same with any other software. It is not altering a
program to send data which it is designed to handle (such as via keyboard
inputs) to it. Why would a program or it's designer/manufacturer for that matter
care where the input data comes from?

Companies do that all of the time. They write software for some niche area for
communications, data transfer, whatever. That is why Microsoft introduced things
such as DDE, OLE, and COM, to make it easier to applications to communicate
together. But this does not mean that an application has to have a communication
path such as these set up in order to communicate to the software. A vendor has
no control over how you use your software.

I had a similar type of problem with a piece of software (chess related, so this
is not off topic, but I will not name names) a few years back where the software
manufacturer claimed the database to it's software could handle x amount of
entries, but it could not. Although 99% of the users would probably want to use
the software to put x/1000 entries in and that was the main use of the software,
I wanted to put x entries in. The vendor's position is that no reasonable person
would want to use the software in that manner. My position was (beyond the claim
that it could do this) that I wanted to do it, so he had no control over how I
use his software.

The same here. A vendor has no right to tell you how to use his software as long
as you do not use an illegal copy (which could for example be using a copy of
the software on a second computer, etc.).

KarinsDad :)



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