eesrajm@cc.brunel.ac.uk (Andrew J Michael) (05/25/91)
I've just got back from a couple of weeks away to find the net full of articles about Fred van Kempen and Prentice-Hall. My first reaction was `Oh no - it's "Your Articles Sold for Cash" all over again, with the same degree of ranting and uninformed comment'. Let's try to address this in a sensible fashion, and see exactly what is happening here. Firstly, Fred is _NOT_ in the business of giving away free copies of MINIX, regardless of what some people might think. P-H would be very unhappy about that idea, and I'm sure that Fred would be the first to agree with them. Fred has produced an enhanced version of MINIX, partly from net postings and partly his own efforts. He has then offered to make that available to those people who can prove (by producing a boot disk) that they have a genuine licensed copy of MINIX. In fact by insisting on a P-H boot disk, he has denied access to those people who, quite legally, use a copied MINIX in accordance with P-H's own copying restrictions. This all sounds pretty reasonable to me. The MINIX Centre has written permission from P-H to supply "upgrades and enhancements" to MINIX. I presume that Fred has the same type of agreement. In that case I don't see what Fred is doing wrong. However, P-H see things differently. I suspect that part of this is due to the fact that Fred used the word "MINIX" in the title of his enhanced version. "MINIX" is a trademark of P-H, who don't like other people using it without permission. What is far more worrying is that P-H seem to be objecting to the distribution of code in Fred's version which they consider to be covered by their copyright. Let's just consider this for a moment. No-one can deny that MINIX-1.5 is a vast improvement over MINIX-1.1. Equally well, I don't think that many people would disagree that a lot of that improvement is due to the efforts of people on the net, especially Bruce Evans. These improvements and bug-fixes have been posted to the net over the years, and eventually found their way into MINIX-1.5. But when MINIX-1.5 appeared, all this code was covered by the blanket P-H copyright. P-H's attitude seems to be that any code originally posted to the net by Bruce and now incorporated into MINIX-1.5 cannot be redistributed - even by Bruce !! This seems pretty ridiculous to me. Perhaps part of the problem is that P-H is a publishing firm, not a software house. For this reason they don't understand upgrades. After all, when you buy a second edition of a book you have to buy it in its entirety, not just the bits which have changed. They seem to be applying this principle to MINIX as well. I also suggest that P-H should look to their own behaviour before accusing others of breaking copyright. The following is from src/lib/other/regexp.c - * Copyright (c) 1986 by University of Toronto. * Written by Henry Spencer. Not derived from licensed software. * * Permission is granted to anyone to use this software for any * purpose on any computer system, and to redistribute it freely, * subject to the following restrictions: * * 1. The author is not responsible for the consequences of use of * this software, no matter how awful, even if they arise * from defects in it. * * 2. The origin of this software must not be misrepresented, either * by explicit claim or by omission. It's funny, but I don't see any reference to Henry Spencer in the MINIX-1.5 copyright messages. P-H might also care to look at the copyright in src/commands/more.c as well. To see how others do it, look at the stream of copyright messages produced by Dell UNIX SVR4 when it boots. I think it's about time P-H got their act together on this one. They've had long enough to think about it, after all. P-H must realise that they are making a lot of money out of the net's improvements to MINIX, and if they continue in this fashion it is P-H who will be the losers in the end. I'll get down off my soapbox now ..... Andy Michael -- Andy Michael "You might think that. I 85 Hawthorne Crescent couldn't possibly comment." West Drayton - `House of Cards' Middlesex email: eesrajm@brunel.ac.uk UB7 9PA or Andrew.Michael@brunel.ac.uk