[NTLK] Progress report : Apple NCU on modern hardware, and question about file distribution

[Victor Rehorst]

Though I don't run UNNA anymore, I can safely say that there is no such 
agreement.  All of Apple's Newton related software has essentially 
become abandonware.  The exception has been the Newton OS ROMs, because 
they contain certain piece of code that Apple still cared about, in an 
intellectual property sense.

One being some of the QuickDraw algorithms which were covered by 
patents, though that's probably no longer an issue - Apple donated the 
source code to the Computer History Museum over a decade ago, and the 
patents have likely long expired.

The other one is Larry Yaeger's "Rosetta" printed handwriting 
recognition system, which later resurfaced in OS X as the Inkwell 
handwriting recognition feature.

For many years, UNNA has hosted the NewtonDev HFS disk image that I put 
together, which contains MPW and all of the Newton OS C++ developer 
tools, debuggers, and driver development kit. I believe some of those 
packages originally required people to sign an NDA with Apple.

TL;DR I wouldn't worry about it, but ultimately UNNA is run by Morgan 
Aldridge now, so it's their call.

-V

On 2024-04-08 15:25, Tom wrote:
> Obviously UNNA(.org) is distributing Apple's copyrighted software. Do
> they (we !) have a special arrangement to do so ?
> I have modified versions of the three NCU install disks (needed to work
> with VirtualBox) that would need hosting somewhere to simplify the
> process.
> Virtual Machines for Windows 3.11 are available on archive.org so I
> assume Microsoft are cool with using it too.
>
> So as long as Apple are cool about NCU distribution, I could make a
> "golden" Windows image, and upload it to archive.org or Mega.nz or
> something and probably not get into trouble. You'd be able to import
> that into your VirtualBox and start using NCU straight away.