Date: Thu, 27 Jun 1996 17:30:42 -0400 (EDT) From: Bill/Carolyn Pechter <pechter@shell.monmouth.com> To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Good News re PDP Unix Licensing (perhaps we'll see FreeBSD on pdp11's) Message-ID: <199606272130.RAA08692@shell.monmouth.com>
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Folks -- perhaps if 2.9BSD becomes available some of the FreeBSD goodies will port over (at least the utilities) Forwarded message: >From pat+@transarc.com Thu Jun 27 12:12:10 1996 If-Type-Unsupported: send From: wkt@csadfa.cs.adfa.oz.au (Warren Toomey) Message-Id: <9606270206.AA02788@dolphin> Subject: Good News re PDP Unix Licensing To: oldunix@minnie.cs.adfa.oz.au (PDP Unix Preservation) Date: Thu, 27 Jun 1996 12:06:47 +1000 (EST) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24 ME8a] Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Resent-Date: Thu, 27 Jun 1996 10:45:35 -0400 (EDT) Resent-From: Pat Barron <pat@transarc.com> Resent-To: INFO-PDP11 Mailing List <+dist+/afs/transarc.com/usr/postman/DistLists/pdp.dl@transarc.com> Resent-Message-Id: <Pine.SUN.3.91.960627104535.15825A@unix3.transarc.com> All, I just received a very pleasing letter from Dion L. Johnson II, the Product Manager at SCO, about the legal status of the PDP UNIXs. I've included his email and my response below. If I can get a legally authorative statement on paper from SCO, I'll pass it on to you all, especially Steven Schultz. Cheers, Warren In atricle by Dion: > > SCO owns the licensing rights all versions of the UNIX system, or > so our legal folks tell me. Now, of course there are many > derivative, licensed versions, and some of the holders of those > licenses have rights to sublicense. In the case of BSD > enhancements, the Berkeley additions are owned by the Regents of > the University of California, and I believe the UCB license terms > are well known. > > As for your friends who have rescued ancient PDP machines... I > am confident that SCO would cheerfully encourage them to run UNIX > on these antiques without any payment to us. I cant quite > officially give that permission myself, but I can speculate that > SCO certainly would not mind. > > So go for it. Does this help? > -Dion >Dion L. Johnson II - The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. dionj@sco.com >SCO Product Manager - Development Systems and Various Other Stuff >400 Encinal St. Santa Cruz, CA 95061 FAX: 408-427-5417 Voice: 408-427-7565 Dion, thanks very much for your email, in fact I'm ecstatic! I know this could be a tricky legal minefield, so if possible could SCO draft a letter (and run it past their lawyers) which sets out exactly what you said above. In particular, you said that ``SCO would cheerfully encourage them to run UNIX on these antiques without any payment to us''. Does this mean I can legally distribute the source code to the PDP versions of UNIX, and to anybody? or just to people who own PDP-11s. There are PDP-11 emulators available, so it is conceivable that people who don't even have a real PDP-11 might like to try UNIX out on these emulators. If to anybody, then I assume this means the source is legally owned by SCO but freely distributable? I really appreciate your offer of making these old versions of UNIX available, but given the legal status of the code to this point, I would like to cover myself with an officially blessed and signed document from SCO. Let me know what you can do, and many many thanks again for this! Cheers, Warren ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Bill Pechter/Carolyn Pechter | 17 Meredith Drive, Tinton Falls, NJ 07724, 908-389-3592 | pechter@shell.monmouth.com I'll run Win95 on my box when you pry the keyboard from my cold, dead hands. FreeBSD, OS/2, CP/M, RT11, spoken here.
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