[NTLK] Last attempt at ROMs for Einstein, I need your help

[David Arnold]

In my understanding of such matters, the main roadblock ends up being legal: even if there is executive willingness to make something available, there is both the cost (time) and practical ability to determine whether some software can be made available to copy/distribute at no cost.

Legal folks need to determine to their satisfaction that there’s no third-party obligations to be met. The sort of thing that immediately springs to mind is the cursive handwriting recognizer from Paragraph: Apple potentially had/has a royalty obligation to pay a per-copy license fee for it.  Often, the parties to such agreements are long since defunct or the ownership of specific products is buried under layers of corporate acquisitions: it can be impossible to determine who to even pay, even if you know what is included in the ROM. 

Such ambiguities are legal timebombs: a lawsuit waiting to happen years later when someone desperate for money figures out that they own it (maybe), and Apple has been giving it away — jackpot!   Apple legal will never sign off on a release with this kind of thing unresolved.

Given the elapsed time, the documentation chaos that likely occurred with the Newton Inc spin-off and subsequent reabsorption, and the frankly limited upside for Apple even if it were possible to identify and sort out all the legalities, I don’t hold much hope that such a release would be possible. 

All that said, if someone wants to draft a letter, I’d be happy to help with editing and refining the message (and sign it, of course).

Apologies for the pessimism,



d


> On 27 Aug 2023, at 21:41, Matthias Melcher <m.melcher at robowerk.de> wrote:
> 
> 
> Thanks to Noah and his awesome movie full of Love Notes, the Newton just gained some attention again. I would love to use this opportunity for a last stab at getting permission from Apple to use the ROM with Einstein. Life with the emulator would be so much easier. We could even have a webasm version of Einstein that runs in any modern browser, maybe even have a special permission for the App Store. Any additional resources, documentation, source code fragment, would also really help!
> 
> While this will by no means change the world of computing, it would help Apple to reference a great piece of history that they created many years ago, and in the end was probably much more of an inspiration to create the iPhone than most people know.
> 
> Anyway, I am German, and my English is good enough for coding, but it is by no means good enough to write a petition to Tim Cook and whoever else could be solicited with this quest. Can anyone in this community, or the community as a whole, write such a letter? 
> 
> Once we have something in writing with hopefully a lot of signatures, I am sure that we find a way to deliver the mail.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> - Matthias
> 
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