mark@cbosgd.UUCP (10/20/83)
I have to disagree with Bill Shannon's interpretation of the 4BSD license. Software that contains any part of UNIX/32V is covered by the AT&T license and can only be disclosed to licensees of 32V, System III, or System V. Anything else on the distribution (e.g. that was done entirely at Berkeley, or somewhere else and a release has been signed) is in the public domain. Berkeley does not attempt to decide what was and was not in 32V, that's up to the party that wants to send something out. Section 4 of the 4.2BSD license reads in part "the Fourth Berkeley Software Distribution CONTAINS [emphasis mine] proprietary software belonging to AT&T and licensed by AT&T as UNIX/32V. ... LICENSEE agrees to treat AT&T's proprietary software included in the Fourth Berkeley Software Distribution in the same manner as if such included proprietary software had been received directly ... from AT&T". Note that "contains" is not the same as "consists entirely of". There is plenty of software on 4BSD that does not belong to AT&T. It is quite true that anything posted to net.sources has been, in effect, published. So anything you post goes into the public domain. If you post something covered by an AT&T UNIX license, you have violated your license and AT&T can sue you into the ground. (I interpret this to mean that you can't post whole programs or modules, but that diff listings showing bug fixes are OK. I am not a lawyer so my interpretation is worth what you paid for it.) In the specific case of the UDA50 driver, I don't recall there being a UDA50 driver in 32V. Who wrote the driver? What restrictions did the author place on the distribution of the driver? Mark Horton