steve@lpi3230.UUCP (Steve Burbeck) (03/13/85)
> What is the licensing status of Berkeley (4.1) software on > Edition VII? Obviously 4.1 tools are allowed to be run on > Edition VII, because we have vi, csh, curses and various > /usr/ucb goodies. But there are other such goodies (e.g., > Mail, last, fmt) which don't come with Edition VII. I am not a lawyer, and I believe that you are. So I won't comment on the contractual relationship between you and P-E except to say that I believe that your license restricts what you may disclose of the software you received from P-E, and has nothing whatsoever to say about what you may compile with that software or use from other sources. As for the status of BSD software, it is a strange mix of public domain and protected AT&T software vintage 32V. 32V is later than V7, so your V7 license from P-E does not entitle you to have AT&T proprietary source from BSD. Your XELOS license, if you get one, will allow all BSD software. In any case, many if not most of the newer commands in 4.1BSD were entirely written at Berkeley by the busy little hands of many under/graduate students (and the coding style shows it. AT&T has no claim on that code. So the legal difficulties you may encounter depend on the code you want to run. There are two other interesting/important aspects to this issue: First, several sites in Australia are running approximations to 4.1BSD and 4.2BSD on their P-E machines [I have been compiling a list of P-E users with details such as this which I will post when I feel it is more or less complete]. I don't know what the legal lineage of these systems is or what version of AT&T source they derive from. But these people may know more about what you can use from 4.XBSD with a V7 license. Second, as you mentioned, many of the Berkeley commands were ported to Edition VII by TWG. Where do you suppose they came from? They obviously are subsumed under a V7 license. I am not certain, but I believe that they came from 2.8BSD -- a PDP-11 system which tracked the Vax development of 4.xBSD as much as possible. 2.8BSD, and its later relative, 2.9BSD derive from V7, not 32V, and hence should present no problem for those with Edition VII source licenses (and their binaries should be available to those of us with binary licenses). The 2.9BSD source tape from Berkeley contains all sorts of goodies, including Ingress, TCP/IP networking software, new mailers, uucp, etc. I would explore this avenue if I were you. Steve Burbeck Linus Pauling Institute