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sure the deal you mentioned is about redistributing unaltered binaries, not about a new derivative work based on the sources.
That's always been my understanding of the limit of the contract Bernd Korz got his hands on. How he managed to twist it into something else takes my breath away. If a game company shuts down and all its intellectual property rights get put into limbo or transfered, it doesn't give the publisher the right to sell modified copies of the game. If there was a code leak and hungry fan base, you couldn't use it to create and sell a fresh version, and a patch would be so deep in murky territory it's not funny.
> Be had stopped selling it directly at that point.
AFAIR, R4.5 was the last direct sale Be Inc did. R5 was only sold to the general public by GoBe, Koch media and a French licensor of whose name I forget. There might have been a Japanese one too, I'm not sure. I think the R5 CD's Be Inc produced were only for developers and people who they always gave free upgrades to (BeBox owners for example), but I may be wrong. I certainly never remember Be ever selling directly from late 1999 to 2001.




Member since:
2005-07-17
I remember that Gobe also retained distributorship after Be went belly up. They were also authorized to print their own CDs for R5... that's where I got mine. Be had stopped selling it directly at that point. Several years later (about 2002?) when I bought Gobe Productive for Windows they were still hawking copies of BeOS long after it was sold off. I remember from the press at the time, Gobe was given large leeway to "support" their "distro" of BeOS. Perhaps yT believed they "bought" similar arrangements.