Isn't copyright law a pain; it'd be nice if old ROMs lapsed into PD after x number of years since the last hardware. But it only reveals the need for another project; an open-source OS for the Newton. Then that could be run on Einstein, and you'd have a Newton-clone.
The post I was quoting, BTW, was not about Newton-guts-dependent things; it was about landscape/portrait switching. Which CAN be implemented on normal OS/filesystem combos.