Mac Forum / Programming / CodeWarrior / April 2006

Andy Bettis ha scritto:

Well, of course if somebody is willing to sell it, there is absolutely
no legal reason preventing him/her to do so (and, frankly speaking, I'd
prefer to buy a second-hand version, given the fact that I'll use it
only for a very particular project and probably I won't use CW anymore
- I'm beginning to get used to Xcode2, now)...
...another thing is, of course, simply "giving it away". I dunno about
this point, because it's really abandonware, so probably it's like any
other issue about abandonware - it's not exactly legal to give it away,
but there isn't anymore a company behind interested in developing and
selling it so you're not harming anyone (and noone will complain if you
do so)...

Give away *a copy*?  Yes, there are legal reasons why that is not
permitted, even if the product is dead.  Giving away the entire
product, including manuals or existing backups, of course is legal (or
selling it for that matter).  It's usually a good idea to go through
Metrowerks to do this, so that any remaining support available can be
transferred, but there is no legal requirement for this.

With the large number of defections from CodeWarrior to Xcode (due to
the Intel fiasco), I should think there will be a large number of
ex-CodeWarrior users willing to sell or give away their versions.
Frankly, I think most of them don't bother posting since it does not
occur to them that there are any takers out there.

In practice though, I would highly doubt that many companies would
bother pursuing the pirating of discontinued products.  In the case of
Metrowerks (or Freescale, as the "Metrowerks" name is being debranded),
they are no longer in the Mac or Windows markets at all any longer.
Typically, a company will spend money on piracy prevention to stop
potential sales losses.  With Mac & Windows sales of $0 moving forward,
there is not a strong business case here (although they would be in
their legal rights to do so, if they so chose).

As an aside, it appears that Metrowerks is still technically selling
version 10 for the Mac.  They had previously announced that they would
cease selling the Mac version as of the end of March.  One optimistic
(and unlikely) possibility is that CodeWarrior/Mac sales are so brisk
that they have chosen to extend the offer.  A more likely scenario is
that no sales have been made in several weeks, and upper management at
Freescale simply have forgotten that the associated web page even
exists.

With Apple's irreversible move to Intel, and CodeWarrior's inability to
create Intel native code (or even debug on Macintels), the question is
not: Is legal to give away a copy?  The question is: Why would you want
such a copy anyway?  Would it not be better to simply take your project
and source files and convert them into Xcode and Visual C++?