Date: Wed, 09 Oct 2002 13:14:42 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: "Gary W. Swearingen" <swear@attbi.com> Cc: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Congrats to Brett Glass for new BSD history article Message-ID: <3DA48E32.2F841084@mindspring.com> References: <20021008145226.K30424-100000@pogo.caustic.org> <3DA36DF9.CD52524F@mindspring.com> <lnadln5wox.dln@localhost.localdomain>
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"Gary W. Swearingen" wrote: > Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> writes: > > For a long time, UCB did not "upgrade" its source license, because > > of the additional restrictions the new license tried to place on > > the code. They were happy with the old license. > > Any guess when they DID upgrade their license and the gist of the new > terms? They refused to disclose the information. There is also some question about the derivation of works. Clearly, a new license only supercesess an old one, if those are terms of the new license (e.g. I can have a copy of Windows 3.1, licensed in perpetuity, and I won't lose access to it after a year when I buy a PC with Windows XP on it ...yet, anyway). > Please confirm (to make this perfectly clear) what you seem to be > implying, that both schools and companies (and not just DoD contractors) > used, without paying any licensing fees, the then-current versions of > the "BSD OS" the entire time they were available (1978-now?). There was a tape copying fee. They also (later) instituted a AT&T UNIX source license requirement, when the VAX/VM code went in. But yes, both the University of Utah and Weber State University had such a license. For the Net/2 distribution, which was the second distribution of a VM BSD, with the derivative work portions excoriated, almost every network device vendor on the planet, including Standford University, Sun (SUN := Stanford Univerity Network computer), and CISCO, etc., used the code without paying any licensing fees. It was, in fact, this lack of having paid fees that permitted the withdrawl of the UCSD P-code system from distribution, for all licensees except Apple, who paid a fee to ensure the license was in perpetuity, and used the P-code system in their "QuickDraw" implementation in the original Macintosh. Similarly, UCB attempted to withdrawl the Net/1 and Net/2 code, which they felt they had a right to do, under the same legal theory. Not everyone complied, and the withdrawl was not legally enforced (it was a "de juris" threat, a use of a legal club, and generally uneforcible). > So when Dennis Ritchie said "The contractors got the UNIX licenses from > Bell Labs, but they got the BSD software from Berkeley.", he was > referring to a no-cost license. And when history writers refer to > "buying BSD", they're referring only to the cost of tapes, etc. Yes. > One exception might have been AT&T itself, which (as I understand > things) might have paid very high prices for the products of WE & > Bell Labs, as allowed by the 1956 decree, to fund those companies. Perhaps. But they were not permitted to recover such costs externally, so the accounting tricks only mattered to their bottom line tax bill. > But it's OK to consider them one big company in this discussion. > > A nice, short history of AT&T, WE, and Bell Labs is at > http://www.bell-labs.com/history/lucent.html Yes; there used to be some interesting papers on alice, as well; I'm not sure what happened to them, once Dennis was moved around. I'm pretty sure the current "alice" is not the same as the old "alice.research.att.com". -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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