It's a long one folks...

After posting about the Virtual Acorn VirtualA5000 emulator, based on Red Squirrel, word came that Paul Middleton had said that RISC OS emulators were in fact breaking copyright. This has caused much speculation, on the newsgroups and here on our news boards. Having now got a copy of the Foundation newsletter in question, and having asked Aaron Timbrell (who is marketing VirtualA5000) for his opinion, here's what I can gather...

Dated December 17th, the full VirtualA5000 message came like this...

Virtual Acorn is the new brand name for commercial versions of the exceptionally popular Red Squirrel Acorn emulator. The first commercial RISC OS emulator for Windows, called VirtualA5000, emulates an Acorn A5000 computer with up to 16Mb of RAM.

This allows a user with a Windows PC to run RISC OS on it, and hence run RISC OS programs. Following our agreement with Pace, the copyright holders for RISC OS, VirtualA5000 will be supplied complete with RISC OS 3.11, the universal !Boot sequence and a host of applications (full details to be announced). Projected price is £29 (plus carriage).

VirtualA5000 will get its first public release at the BETT 2002 show in early January. For more details please visit the VirtualAcorn website at http://www.VirtualAcorn.co.uk

The Foundation newsletter, dated 8th January, had this to say (with our emphasis added)...

RISC OS emulators
There has been much discussion on newsgroups recently about programs designed to emulate an ARM based computer running on Wintel based PC's.

Until recently these programs have been released as shareware and were only capable of running RISC OS 3 based software.

However recent releases have been promoted as being capable of running RISC OS 4 and even RISC OS Select.

These programs raise serious questions regarding RISC OS licencing as all current ROM versions of RISC OS are only licenced for use on one machine and there is no allowance for RISC OS being copied out of ROM from one machine for use on another computer.

(The RISC OS Select Scheme is different as it allows use on multiple machines owned by one person which have RISC OS 4 installed in ROM on each machine.)

RISCOS Ltd has the worldwide licence to the RISC OS Operating System for use in the Desktop Computer Market and I have to report that no-one has a written licence to distribute any version of RISC OS for use with PC based emulators.

Any unlicenced sales of any version RISC OS means that the income from those sales only goes to those who are pirating RISC OS and does not go into further developments of RISC OS.

If you have bought an emulator in the expectation of running RISC OS on it then there is no product which is legally licenced to do that at present. RISC OS 3.11 in particular has not been placed into the public domain and Pace as copyright holders of RISC OS have made it quite clear that they reserve all rights to take action against anyone who abuses the RISC OS rights by illegal distribution of unlicenced copies of RISC OS.

If you have paid for any form of Acorn emulator which includes any version of the RISC OS Operating System then we strongly suggest that you return the product to the supplier for a full refund until such time as legally licenced copies of RISC OS are available from RISCOS Ltd for use with such emulators.

Now, given the disparity in the dates - three weeks in fact - it seems unlikely that Paul was unaware of the VirtualA5000 posting. Also note in our emphasis that he talks about paid for emulators - how many other paid-for RISC OS emulators are there out there? Red Squirrel isn't Shareware, it's completely free; the only other RISC OS emulator currently available is Archie, which is also a free download and seems to have gone into "hibernation" in February 2001. So, this posting seems aimed specifically at VirtualA5000, rather than just the PD emulators. It also seems a pity that the concept of "fair use" doesn't seem to come into play either, that is, is making a copy of your own legitimate software (i.e. the OS in ROM) really breaking copyright as Paul insists?

Aaron responded to both myself and Paul Vigay's request for a quote, and basically he's adamant that he's licensed RISC OS 3.1 from Pace, who are the copyright holders. As he says, he wouldn't be "advertising the product, promoting it, attending the BETT show, and sending sample versions to Pace without an agreement". And given that Paul M says himself that Pace hold the copyright, it would seem that Aaron is completely in the right here.

So, just a case of bad timing in the release of the two messages? Was Paul Middleton misinformed? Didn't bother to check the facts? Or a bit of FUD to stop people buying a copy of RISC OS he's not in control of? He, alas, has not been quite so forthcoming via email, so perhaps there will have to be yet another followup to this saga.