km@emory.UUCP (Ken Mandelberg) (05/12/87)
This is a legal question not a technical one.
Suppose two machines are licensed for the same Unix source. Is it legal
to keep the source on one and export it to the other. Here, export
means using Sun NFS or AT&T RFS.
The answer would seem obviously to be yes, but obvious is not
sufficient for our administration. They need something in writing. So
the real question is: has anyone seen or obtained a written statement
from AT&T which is a basis for sharing AT&T source code via RFS/NFS
between machines licensed for that source code?
Now that I've asked a very straight forward (and perhaps uninteresting)
question, I'll tell you why I am really interested. We are licensed by
Mt. Xinu for 4.3+NFS. The license allows us to keep source on one
machine and distribute binaries to all campus machines. We really want
to export the source to several machines which abide by all other
access agreements for the source. Mt. Xinu tells us that the reason
they cannot authorize this in writing is that their distribution
contains AT&T source code, and they have no basis for a statement that
allows sharing of AT&T source code via NFS between machines with the
same AT&T licensing.
This may all seem ridiculously picky (it does to me). However, the
effect is real, we are not allowed to export source. Replies that
either answer the narrow question above, or site precedent in a similar
setting would be appreciated.
--
Ken Mandelberg | {akgua,sb1,gatech}!emory!km USENET
Emory University | km@emory CSNET,BITNET
Dept of Math and CS | km.emory@csnet-relay ARPANET
Atlanta, Ga 30322 | Phone: (404) 727-7963gwyn@brl-smoke.ARPA (Doug Gwyn ) (05/15/87)
In article <2051@emory.UUCP> km@emory.UUCP (Ken Mandelberg) writes: >Suppose two machines are licensed for the same Unix source. Is it legal >to keep the source on one and export it to the other. Here, export >means using Sun NFS or AT&T RFS. Having recently gone through the preliminaries for establishing UNIX sublicensing, I can tell you what the answer is. However, I don't have it in writing; I got the information over the phone from the people in Greensboro NC. AT&T UNIX source licensees may exchange source code covered by their licenses (assuming they're the same licensed product, not different release versions). They of course have to protect the AT&T proprietary code from disclosure to unauthorized persons. Since an RFS connection may be via a third, unlicensed site, one would have to be more careful. Also, some networks are essentially broadcast and this too would be somewhat unsafe. Binary distribution is a whole nother ball game.