>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