Legality of distributing Apple II and //e firmware?

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Level 1

0 points

Legality of distributing Apple II and //e firmware?

Hi, I've been developing an emulator for the classic Apple II series of from computers from the late 1970's and through the 1980's. I had a question about Apple's current stance of distributing the original Apple II and //e firmware ROM data along with, or even hardcoded into the emulator. I wouldn't think they may not care, seeing how when these things were released the Steves were still working out of a garage, and it has absolutely no impact on the company today.

I wanted to see if maybe somebody who works with on corporate side of things at Apple had any insight on this? Thanks!

Apple II-OTHER

Posted on Jan 16, 2012 10:26 PM

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Answer 1

Allan Jones

Level 9

79,736 points

Jan 17, 2012 5:41 AM in response to miker00lz2

Welcome Miker,

These are user-to-user forums and Apple employees don't monitor them except for the Hosts, whose job it is ti see that the Terms of Use and some reasonable level of decorum are maintained,

I think for a question like yours, a letter is the better route. Use the mailing address on this page: http://www.apple.com/contact/

You probably should also look into the dvelopers forums here:

Developer Forums

Another user might know more about how Apple handles this type of inquiry better.

Good luck!

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Answer 2

kengagne

Level 1

9 points

Jan 17, 2012 7:21 AM in response to miker00lz2

Hi, Mike —

Like Allan, IANAL, but I've seen no precedent for allowing these ROMs to be distributed. The documentation for Sweet16, a popular Apple IIgs emulator, states:

"To run Sweet16, you need a copy of the Apple IIgs ROM from either a ROM 01 or ROM 3 Apple IIgs system. For legal reasons regarding copyright law, you must extract a copy of the ROM from an Apple IIgs you personally own in order to legally use Sweet16. If you contact us asking for a ROM image, we'll delete your email and pretend you never asked."

I assume this developer did his homework.

-Ken

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Answer 3

varjak paw

Level 10

182,686 points

Jan 17, 2012 8:48 AM in response to miker00lz2

The firmware is stil under copyright and everything I've seen indicates that Apple is still enforcing their rights. Hence it is still illegal to distribute the ROM data. The firmware is most definitely not in the public domain. You can contact Apple's software licensing department and ask if they will allow distribution:

http://developer.apple.com/softwarelicensing/

Without explicit written permission, though, assume that it is indeed illegal.

Regards.

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Answer 4

Jan 24, 2012 9:13 PM in response to miker00lz2

Years ago, a company in Australia made a laptop. It came out before Apple ever made one. In order to run the laptop, you had to buy the cheapest Mac Plus you could find and remove chips from an authentic Apple product to get the laptop to work. High price to pay but some were willing to pay to play.

Compaq was the first company to reverse engineer the BIOS chip for DOS so they would not have to pay royalties to IBM. Pretty expensive process. You may have an expensive hobby on your hands.

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