[NTLK] write to Tim Cook

[Aaron Brigati]

On Dec 2, 2011, at 11:40 AM, Andrei Chichak wrote:
> 
> As one of those puny humans who write source code, nobody is going to hand over their commercial source code without compensation. 

There are several companies that release the source code to their obsolete product without compensation.

iD Software, for instance, tends to give away the code to its previous generation game engine. Sure, someone could take that and make a game. I'm not aware of any commercial games using it though; lots of community effort, but commercial stuff wants the latest and greatest, not old code.

I think the Newton OS pretty much qualifies as obsolete (and even abandoned) product from Apple's point of view. However, Apple doesn't own all of it; large chunks are licensed from other companies, so even if Apple wanted to release the source they almost certainly can't.