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Date:      Wed, 24 Nov 1999 10:53:42 -0800
From:      Jason Evans <jasone@canonware.com>
To:        Mike Smith <mike@smith.net.au>
Cc:        Julian Elischer <julian@whistle.com>, freebsd-arch@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Threads and my new job.
Message-ID:  <19991124105342.N301@sturm.canonware.com>
In-Reply-To: <199911241635.IAA04101@dingo.cdrom.com>; from mike@smith.net.au on Wed, Nov 24, 1999 at 08:35:03AM -0800
References:  <Pine.BSF.4.10.9911240230070.11412-100000@current1.whistle.com> <199911241635.IAA04101@dingo.cdrom.com>

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On Wed, Nov 24, 1999 at 08:35:03AM -0800, Mike Smith wrote:
> > > What am I going to do?  My first mandate is to round out the edges of our
> > > current libc_r and to bring it closer to standards compliance before 4.0.
> ...
> > can you buy the posix standard on CD and stick it in a drive at WC so we
> > can read the official specs? (at least from Freefall)
> 
> If you can tell us which documents to buy and where from, we'll do just 
> that.

It is IEEE Standard 1003.1, 1996 Edition.  It costs $215 for a single-user
license, and the format is PDF (the print version is $120).  I asked about
multiple users, and the sales agent said, "Well, you can give your pass
code to others so they can download it."  When asked if that was legal per
the license agreement, she responded that I'd have to talk with customer
service.

From what I can intuit from the IEEE web site, to legally put the standard
online, even to a limited audience such as the committers, would cost us
many thousands of dollars.  I personally ordered a hard-copy from
fatbrain.com yesterday, basically because the prospects of making the spec
electronically available to multiple developers appears to be financially
and/or legally prohibitive.

As an individual passing copies to friends, perhaps such licensing
agreements aren't a huge deal.  However, as an organization (FreeBSD) or a
company (Walnut Creek CDROM), I'd be very leery of violating the license.

Also, I don't think it's critical that everyone have access to the
standard.  There are a number of good books that cover pthreads in enough
detail that only those concerned with pedantic compliance really need to
read the standard.  In addition, the Single Unix Specification, Version 2
is available online at http://www.opengroup.org with free registration.
This is a superset of pthreads, which means that unless interested in the
exact details of levels of conformance to the POSIX standard, there is
online documentation freely available for all of pthreads (plus some).

Jason




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