>Nahh.. dBASE came from Vulcan which was developed at JPL. As such, being developed at a governmentally funded organization the product immediately entered the realm of Public Domain; or so I have been told....
You're right Doug:
"On December 11, 1990, Judge Hatter issued an order invalidating Ashton-Tate's copyrights in its own dBase line of programs, the foundation of its business, on the ground that Ashton-Tate had knowingly deceived the United States Copyright Office when it filed its copyright registrations for the dBase programs. The court stated that although Ashton-Tate knew that its programs were derived from JPLDIS, a public domain program developed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, it had "repeatedly failed" to disclose this fact to the Copyright Office when it filed its copyright applications for the programs."Source: "Ashton-Tate vs Fox Software (The California Court's Decision ) -
The History of FoxPro" (
http://www.black-beans.com.br/foxprohistory/ashton_sues_fox.htm)
Fernando