I am also opposed to "paying to pirate" but that's not how I see this situation. He has added significant value over the original Mac ROM and that's what he's charging for. Acting like nobody's allowed to make money hurts communities.
This is an unauthorized derivative work. He is not entitled to make any money for it without Apple's consent under current copyright law.
It's the same as you, being not-Disney, making a sequel to a Disney movie and putting it in theaters.
Then he turns around and tries to indicate that it's wrong for others to profit from derivative works based on his efforts.
Either copyright law is just and valid, or it isn't.
Either what his competitors are doing with his work is wrong and bad (as he seems to think it is), and his modification of Apple copyrighted material is also wrong and bad, or what he's doing is okay, which also makes what his competitors are doing okay.
Yes. ROM-booting was something Apple supported in the Mac Classic and no other model. The ROM adds new functionality that wasn't available to the SE/30 (and others). It also adds the ability to boot of a modifiable RAM disk, which is new. Also it's 32 bit clean, unlike Apple's ROMs. So this fixes Apple's bugs as well as adding new abilities to a few models of Macs that they never had. The ROM-booting is facilitated by compression, but putting together a bootable ROM for hardware that's never done it before to ROM-boot off the compressed system image is the hard part, not the compression. Much of that is based on the hard work of Rob Braun, Doug Brown, and others who are credited.
He put a lot of work into this, the thing he made wasn't an existent thing in the world until he did the labor and he documented how to do it for those who want to burn their own. He ships a ROM SIMM with the new image burned on it for $45, given that the ROM SIMM itself isn't free, the whole deal seems fair to me.
The creator has also been involved in Floppy Emu. He's done a ton to help revitalize retrocomputing. Begrudging him selling a ROM image he worked to make is an incredibly toxic take on a person doing really excellent things and sharing the technical details for anyone who want to build the stuff themselves.
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I am also opposed to "paying to pirate" but that's not how I see this situation. He has added significant value over the original Mac ROM and that's what he's charging for. Acting like nobody's allowed to make money hurts communities.
This is an unauthorized derivative work. He is not entitled to make any money for it without Apple's consent under current copyright law.
It's the same as you, being not-Disney, making a sequel to a Disney movie and putting it in theaters.
Then he turns around and tries to indicate that it's wrong for others to profit from derivative works based on his efforts.
Either copyright law is just and valid, or it isn't.
Either what his competitors are doing with his work is wrong and bad (as he seems to think it is), and his modification of Apple copyrighted material is also wrong and bad, or what he's doing is okay, which also makes what his competitors are doing okay.
Has he though? It sounds like it’s all based on Apple’s work decades ago plus an open source compression algorithm that someone else wrote.
Yes. ROM-booting was something Apple supported in the Mac Classic and no other model. The ROM adds new functionality that wasn't available to the SE/30 (and others). It also adds the ability to boot of a modifiable RAM disk, which is new. Also it's 32 bit clean, unlike Apple's ROMs. So this fixes Apple's bugs as well as adding new abilities to a few models of Macs that they never had. The ROM-booting is facilitated by compression, but putting together a bootable ROM for hardware that's never done it before to ROM-boot off the compressed system image is the hard part, not the compression. Much of that is based on the hard work of Rob Braun, Doug Brown, and others who are credited.
He put a lot of work into this, the thing he made wasn't an existent thing in the world until he did the labor and he documented how to do it for those who want to burn their own. He ships a ROM SIMM with the new image burned on it for $45, given that the ROM SIMM itself isn't free, the whole deal seems fair to me.
The creator has also been involved in Floppy Emu. He's done a ton to help revitalize retrocomputing. Begrudging him selling a ROM image he worked to make is an incredibly toxic take on a person doing really excellent things and sharing the technical details for anyone who want to build the stuff themselves.
You've convinced me. If I'm ever in the market for one of these, I'll buy from him to support his work.
There’s also the physical hardware of the device itself. He wants $45, which seems quite reasonable for a custom SIMM with flash memory.
He’s also not restricting the use of his or Apple’s software, so he’s not making any claim, copyright or otherwise.
So he makes the PCBs, loads them up and tests them, then sends them off to the purchaser, all for $45.
Yes, that sounds like a significant value.