Ha, sure it's not the same case. It's exploiting the license somebody else paid for. Not sure why that is morally any better than writing a driver without using any licensed material and relying on the shareware model the picasso authors offer. Wait a moment, that sounds less legitimate than what apollo did but somehow there is no public uproar about it...
See? That's precisely why I say that you haven't done your job properly. Background check. You speculate where you should *know*. Copyright is not a matter of speculation.
Actually, I talked to Alex on this matter, and with the makers of said graphics card. So here are some hard facts (not speculations):
First, the license model for P96 is not what you think what it is. There is no "shareware fee" for graphic card drivers. There is a shareware fee for the existing "old stock" graphics card drivers that come with P96, i.e. what you find in the archive of P96 (cards such as the GVP Spectrum). These drivers can be registered for a shareware fee from the owners of P96 - which are at this time still Tobias and Alex.
Second, if you develop a new graphics card, such a shareware fee does not apply. You need to negotiate and obtain a license. Village Tronic did exactly that, and for this reason, owners of such cards can use P96 for free - it was already paid for, and the license fee for the development kit and the graphics card driver was paid for by the corresponding hardware vendor.
Gunnar always expressed the believe that it is sufficient of users register the Apollo driver for a shareware fee, but that's not the case. There is no possibility to write a new driver and let users register. The vendor has to. Yes, Apollo need to get a license from Tobias and Alex, and yes, I did check with them. That's the opinion of the authors and owners, and not based on some second guessing or sloppy background checking.
Third, Cloanto does not hold a license for P96 at this point either. They paid Tobias and Alex a "lump sum" on a good will basis for "missed income", but there is no contract, and there is no "perpetual license agreement" between them. So in that sense, the UAE driver seems to be in legal limbo as well.
How did this driver come into living: Alex shared some details on the P96 internals with Brian King, who, however, neither obtained a license from Tobias and Alex. Whether the file in question (the UAE picasso96.c file and the corresponding header) is under GPL is a very delicate question as well. The header says "Copyright Brian King", but it does not say what the license conditions are. So it's probably shared "as is", for the single purpose to be used within UAE. A GPL header is missing, and it is arguably whether you can derive from that that the author provided the source under GPL. Given that there is no license on the corresponding header (which is close to the copy of the picasso96 private includes header), and that there is no licensing agreement between Brian and Alex, this is probably not very surprising. In particular, as far as *I* read it, it does not grant anyone any rights to use this driver outside of UAE.
As far as the licenses for this graphics card is derived: This came from a completely different route and goes back to another private agreement with Alex, by email. It is not derived from an UAE driver, or somebody elses work. It was based on "let's simply ask and see what we get". This is probably good enough to get away with for a hobby project, whether this is all sufficient for commercial development I do not know.
So in the end, I really wonder how seriously you take your job, and how easily you defend your position without having done your homework. I tried my very best to research the backgrounds here, and my research method is the most basic one I can recommend to everyone else: Why not simply ask the people that should know? For example, the authors.
