beattie@netxcom.UUCP (Brian Beattie) (12/31/86)
An artical reminded me that vcat was written at U of Toronto and might be available to us poor souls with out source licenses. Does anyone know if this is true and if so where I might get a copy? Thanx -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Brian Beattie | Phone: (703)749-2365 NetExpress Communications, Inc. | uucp: seismo!sundc!netxcom!beattie 1953 Gallows Road, Suite 300 | Vienna,VA 22180 |
henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (01/02/87)
> An artical reminded me that vcat was written > at U of Toronto and might be available to us > poor souls with out source licenses. Does > anyone know if this is true and if so where > I might get a copy? Difficult situation. Yes, vcat was written at U of T. As far as I know, it contained no licensed software and thus in principle there is no bar to distributing it to non-source licensees. However, there are about four serious complications: 1. The U of T license form forbids commercial use, as I recall, although in the past this was generally interpreted to permit anything other than resale or fee-for-access public-access use. I can't say what changes in the form or the interpretation have been made in recent years, since I stopped being involved with the software distribution apparatus at CSRG (now CSRI) quite a while ago. 2. I'm not sure the stuff is even still available; it's probably been a very long time since it was last requested. 3. Back in those days, non-source licenses were essentially nonexistent, so probably nobody ever paid attention to the licensing issues involved. It is possible that the license agreement for that stuff demands a source license even though it's probably not strictly needed. From what I recall, I very strongly suspect that the U of T distribution that included vcat also included a bunch of modified Bell software, in source form of course. 4. You probably do not want the ancient U of T vcat; Berkeley did not just copy it verbatim, they fixed bugs and adopted it to a modernized system (vcat was written for a mutated V6). I believe they also did work on the fonts, and that's important: given a description of the CAT output format from troff, vcat itself is not that hard to write, but supplying it with good fonts isn't so simple. -- Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry