General Category > Building LOS From Source
I've successfully built LOS from source!
AlexTheCat123:
--- Quote from: jamesdenton on June 28, 2025, 11:55:54 am ---Just finished this video and continue to be super impressed with your efforts and success. You guys should be super proud of what you managed to do here. Looking forward to what's to come!
--- End quote ---
Thank you James!
stepleton:
--- Quote from: andrew on June 27, 2025, 09:58:22 pm ---The term benchmark is what worried me the most - it stuck out to me as an odd thing to be against.
--- End quote ---
I'm not a lawyer and this isn't legal advice; in fact, it's not really advice at all.
My familiarity with big tech companies like Apple, however, is that attorneys cost money and are as underprovisioned as any other job role at the company. They will be busy and they will have loads of different people from all different departments asking them to please, please just take a look at this one thing, or review this one launch, or check this policy or approve that one contractor agreement and so on and so on for all time. Everything will be immediate and urgent because some product manager didn't realise that it was necessary to get legal review and $DEADLINE is right around the corner, or because some tech lead is gunning for promo this cycle and that means it is 150% time to launch ASAP so let's get legal to tick the box right now please and thank you. Everyone who talks to you, some Associate Counsel with an employee ID in the low millions, has the most startling and unusual crisis that absolutely must be dealt with right this second.
Therefore it will have been an achievement that the review necessary for this source release, which does very little to advance Apple's most pressing business aims, happened at all; I suspect some arms needed to be twisted in order to get anyone to think about licensing terms for a 40-year-old operating system for a rare computer that has very little relationship, practically speaking, to any of Apple's modern products. And, when someone finally did, I wouldn't necessarily have expected them to have put their absolute heart and soul into the job; it might have been fun to do something different for a change, but that product manager and that tech lead are still pinging them incessantly, and the PM has started muttering about "escalating"...
What I'm saying is that although the clauses are for sure legally binding (assuming the relevant authorities to you will consider them lawful; speak to your lawyer), they may not represent some profound, deeply thought-out plan or some specific attitude that Apple bears toward the Lisa Office System or its community of fans. Ambiguity or puzzlement may be a byproduct of the circumstances under which the agreement was composed. That doesn't mean that Apple's lawyers can't take advantage of that ambiguity later if they decide they want to ding you for sticking your neck out and comparing your improved task scheduler against the one that comes with the OS, but to my mind it means that the peculiarity itself may not really be a useful hint about Apple's motives.
Why does Apple not want you to "benchmark" and what does that mean? I don't really know. But I can't think about it without remembering that attorneys at tech firms cost money and are constantly being bothered to focus on work relating to important, imminent problems that relate pretty directly to the company's bottom line.
andrew:
--- Quote from: stepleton on June 29, 2025, 08:20:31 am ---But I can't think about it without remembering that attorneys at tech firms cost money and are constantly being bothered to focus on work relating to important, imminent problems that relate pretty directly to the company's bottom line.
--- End quote ---
I don't doubt this... I was just offering my thoughts is all, given that both now and even a couple years ago when the code was released, people have been especially concerned about the restrictiveness of this license.
And with all due respect to Apple and all honesty, regarding entirely obsolete 40 year old code for which no amount of development could remotely create anything that would cannibalize Apple's existing revenue sources, in my opinion this license is probably irrelevant so long as people don't start selling copies of rebuilt Lisa software. The code is out there, and many people are going to scroll past the agreement, check the box, and then copy it, share it, and disregard the license entirely. One way or another, the cat is out of the bag.
andrew:
Finally finished watching the Recompiling the Past talk. It really is impressive how you guys managed to accomplish this without going insane.
I appreciated the masterful artistry of the redrawn icons! It's also interesting to know what that file cabinet drawer in the desktop manager icon font represented.
That comment, in the preferences window? I don't think it's a reference to anything. Rather, the programmer who wrote it must have been driven past the point of insanity. Who knows if it was because of the preferences window in particular... although it does have a large amount of UI elements interacting with many different parts of the system. I almost went crazy trying to make a recreation of it in my JS project.
AlexTheCat123:
--- Quote from: andrew on July 01, 2025, 02:58:03 pm ---That comment, in the preferences window? I don't think it's a reference to anything. Rather, the programmer who wrote it must have been driven past the point of insanity. Who knows if it was because of the preferences window in particular... although it does have a large amount of UI elements interacting with many different parts of the system. I almost went crazy trying to make a recreation of it in my JS project.
--- End quote ---
Yeah, I guess so! I looked it up online and the only mention of that text was from someone else who found it in the source code, so it's got to be something original from the programmer. And awesome work with LisaGUI by the way; it's a really impressive project!
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version