mrt@MRT.MACH.CS.CMU.EDU (Mary Thompson) (01/26/91)
Brian Gilstrap's information is essentially correct. Mt Xinu spent about 7 months negotiating with Apple and never suceeded in getting the rights to release MacMach to all customers. I believe that CMU has the rights to distribute it to Educational customers only, but we do not have the manpower to put together a new Mach 2.5 release. As to Micheal Busnell's remarks, MachMac uses the Apple device driver code, which Apple clearly has the rights to control. As a general remark, there are two types of restrictions on Mach 2.5 code, both deriving from the fact that we wanted to make the code run on as many platforms as possible and that we have limited manpower. Whenever possible we used or slightly modified the device driver code provided by the manufacturers. Most of this code contains restrictive copyrights. Since another goal of Mach was to be binary compatible with Unix, we used or modified 4.3BSD code extensively. Most of that code implies the AT&T source license restriction. CMU and Mt Xinu will continue to provide Mach 2.5 releases for the Sun3, Vaxs IBM/RT and some I386 machines. The OSF/1 release is a superset of Mach 2.5 and is available for the Decstation 3100 as well as the Encore multimax and some I386 machines. It is very unlikely that CMU will expand the Mach 2.5 releases to any other platforms, since we are now focusing our limited resources on the Mach 3.0 distribution.