IRIX and Software

Hello.

I see my posts about selling originals of Corel DRAW! for UNIX and Adobe Premiere for SGI have been taken down, per the forum rules so that's fine.

But why does that rule exist? Can someone enlighten me? Of course I understand not trading pirated stuff, but what's wrong with original licenses if they've been removed from the machine they were on?

Hello Pegasus,

The rule exist because in the past the forum was subject to response from SGI about copyright infringement on this site.
Nekonoko, the forum admin, decided to put this rule in effect to avoid any legal issues from any company.

Yeah we can't be too careful about patent/copyright trolls.

You can try selling the software at vcfed or on eBay, otherwise, you could always discuss this privately with your buyers.

We are stuck in a catch 22.
We need a site, not affiliated with neckochan whatsoever run by person[s] willing to take the chance.
Everyone needs to know about it, but we cannot advertise it here.
And here is where everyone comes for SGI related info...

What we need is .. 'the purple web'.. or blue, indigo, green.

I feel dirty even talking about this stuff.

Part of the issue is that a lot of software licenses do state that they aren't transferable. Not all of course, but plenty do mention it. Hence with such software, even though you've bought a legal license, it can be illegal to re-sell it.

uunix wrote: We are stuck in a catch 22.
We need a site, not affiliated with neckochan whatsoever run by person[s] willing to take the chance.
Everyone needs to know about it, but we cannot advertise it here.
And here is where everyone comes for SGI related info...

What we need is .. 'the purple web'.. or blue, indigo, green.

I feel dirty even talking about this stuff.

I do agree. Someones whose got nothing to lose.

There has to be a software depot. Somewhere.

Trippynet wrote: Part of the issue is that a lot of software licenses do state that they aren't transferable. Not all of course, but plenty do mention it. Hence with such software, even though you've bought a legal license, it can be illegal to re-sell it.

that also depends on the country to some extend. in germany for example i never had problems in that regard. in usa however this used to be a no-go and since we're an international, usa based forum it's a tricky situation.

Krokodil wrote: There has to be a software depot. Somewhere.

Viewed from outer space , planet Earth provides a pleasing blue and white view. I want to believe there has to be brains depot. Somewhere, out of there. May be on Alpha Centauri, the closest star system to the Solar System, being 4.37 light-years

What's particularly irksome is that if you call any of these commercial software vendors and ask to buy their IRIX versions they will not sell them to you! Autodesk made a huge mistake when they discontinued the Maya personal learning edition, their 30 day free trial is useless, unless you spend 8 hours a day for that 30 day period you will barely have climbed the learning curve at all. You'd think they'd let people trade 10 year old versions of their software, which they will not sell you no matter how many frogskins you wave in their faces, the big benefit to them would be that people will like the software and want to buy the latest version...

Autodesk have moved to perpetual licensing for 2 years now . I don't think you can even get anything from them on 'hard media' anymore.

Amnesty on 'hard media' license violations FTW! </perfectWorld>

As for selling commercial software I have no idea, but if we're interested in more secure/anonymous/decentralized/accountability-shrugging ways to send pirated software, Freenet would likely work well. We would have to make the USK for it known among ourselves without placing responsibility on Neko though, which means that it's probably best to just email it around.

Newsgroups technically still exist as well. We could go back to comp.sys.sgi!

vishnu wrote: What's particularly irksome is that if you call any of these commercial software vendors and ask to buy their IRIX versions they will not sell them to you! Autodesk made a huge mistake when they discontinued the Maya personal learning edition, their 30 day free trial is useless, unless you spend 8 hours a day for that 30 day period you will barely have climbed the learning curve at all. You'd think they'd let people trade 10 year old versions of their software, which they will not sell you no matter how many frogskins you wave in their faces, the big benefit to them would be that people will like the software and want to buy the latest version...

I did email and ask Autodesk if they have older versions of Maya available for sgi computers and they just said that they don't have it because it's so old.

It's at times like this that you enter the dodgy area of abandonware. Maya isn't abandonware because it's still available for sale. Would it be morally wrong to acquire an SGI copy for free despite them refusing to sell one to you? Probably. Would it be morally wrong though to buy a license for PC and then acquire an SGI copy from somewhere? Probably not, but you can still understand why Neko doesn't like such discussion here.

Toxiccameron wrote: I did email and ask Autodesk if they have older versions of Maya available for sgi computers and they just said that they don't have it because it's so old.

The same happens with Wolfram Mathematica. SGI-Irix is NoGo.

Also there's the issue of those stupid dongles. I have some old versions of Discreet systems software(came from old Octane2 HD) that are unusable because the dongle isn't present.

IRIX is a bit in between. Too old to be useful in a professional setting, but new enough that many of the applications are still actively maintained on other platforms.

Which means I cannot buy the IRIX application because the vendor isn't willing to sell / support it (probably a valid business decision).

But at the same time, if I then keygen the thing, crack dongle protection etc etc, I cannot share this knowledge because it may very well invoke the wrath of the Adobes and Autodesks of this world. Also, though reverse engineering is allowed in many places, circumventing copy protections usually isn't. And as far as sharing goes: try to seed a torrent of PhotoShop v2.5 for IRIX. Thoroughly obsolete and useless. But it won't be long before the nastygrams show up your inbox. Been there (accidentally, really!), learned my lesson.

Maybe in another 5 or 10 years everything will be a cloudy web app and things will be different.

I'd do it, create a software repository so to speak, but in the words of black adders Baldrick, I'd have to come up with a really cunning plan..

Step 1.. a new line, fast and not registered to my company or me or my house, possibly to my Grand Mother, many years deceased now.. kidding on that, she never even owned a computer.
Step 2, ensure it was a DHCP line, create a mailing list that notified people of the new address.
Step 3, Encryption, soooo nobody knew what the traffic was, or maybe VPN type connection (probably have to get some hardware to do that).
Step 4, Members only.
Step 5, Move to a country with no extradition laws.

I think FreeNet could be helpful here. Censorship resistant due to distributed storage, encrypted and anonymous (URL contains a key, otherwise it's gibberish), does not require hosting or even an internet connection once the site is inserted, and allows nice, updatable sites (USK) to index all the software.

Nekochanners could also add each other to the Freenet "friends" system to allow for messaging and make sure inserted data spreads to each other fast and is accessible to all of us (just in case one of our networks is too "far" from another and the data is not accessible). We could even set up "friends only" mode so that it never spreads off our network of machines, or only spreads when we want to use our bandwidth for strangers.

I think if we ran Freenet servers on machines in our houses, we could even access them directly from our SGIs using Mozilla because the Freenet client is effectively a webserver and backend. Freenet sites are all 90's like anyway due to bandwidth and no serverside on distributed networks, so they should look fine even on our old browsers.

This is a topic I always found interesting - I can't imagine many people get their hands on a SGI and don't have an interest in running the software that made SGI's what they were (Alias, Discreet, etc), but yet we have to not discuss this. Bottom line is this site is too valuable a resource for everyone involved so it is what it is.

One good thing about the policy is I still have a fully licensed PowerAnimator 8.1 Indigo2 Extreme that I would have sold a few years ago (when I sort of fell off the SGI kick), but I didn't like the idea of posting the system to ebay so I held off - and now I'm glad I did - that Extreme box is now my 5.3 COFF system ^_^

In 2016 I tried to contact my friends at Pixar who work on Renderman. Many for over 10-15+ years.

I told them I have an old legit Maya and sgi O2 and wanted to see if I could purchase an additional license of renderman for Maya, which wasn't even called that in Irix releases, so I could run it on my o2.

Ian (@pixar not depot) told me have the builds but no way to give me a license. The server no longer sends the license the way they used to and couldn't be setup that way.

So I asked for a nodelocked which they won't do anymore. Even for an old build that could be of little use compared to modern free engines out there.

To me it was/is about preserving a historical hardware/software experience from the 90s.

So I guess if you have a Maya running renderman animation tools on irix and its local node locked you have something very very rare.