mjr@osiris.UUCP (Marcus J. Ranum) (08/25/87)
Since MACH is being developed at CMU under a DARPA grant, who owns it - the taxpayers or CMU ? I'm just curious as to whether CMU is planning on making it easily and freely available, or are they going into the software licensing business like UCB ? Anyone out there know what the plans are ? --mjr(); -- If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy. So I get as crude as possible. These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness... -Johnny Mnemonic
rfr@spice.cs.cmu.edu (Rick Rashid) (08/26/87)
CMU is distributing Mach under a license, but there is no charge, royalty, or fee of any kind associated with the license. In fact, we are sending people documents and tapes at our own expense and losing significant amounts of money. The quid pro quo of the license is that we expect those who sign it to return to CMU modifications to our software so we can freely redistribute those improvements to others. Obviously, as I mentioned before, we require proof of a Berkeley license so the system is not "free" unless you have already paid for that license. CMU generated code, however, is free of charge. We hope to eventually package the distribution such that CMU kernel and user code would be separate from Berkeley derived code and distributable without the Berkeley license requirement. Obviously we would have liked to have had the luxury of avoiding use of licensed software in our work, but the reality is that we are a research organization with limited resources. We felt that it was more important for us to advance the state of the art than to reproduce it in an unlicensed form. We welcome contributions by others such as FSF that enhance our software without adding more complicated licensing requirements or fees. -Rick