rsalz@bbn.com (Rich Salz) (08/11/89)
In <6703@dayton.UUCP> joe@dayton.UUCP (Joseph P. Larson) writes: >I was given a copy of mailx by someone who said they got it from someone >who said it was public domain. ... Up until 4.3Tahoe, UCB did not go to the trouble of individually copyrighting every single file in their source tree. This was done because it was impossible for UCB to separate their code from ATT code, so they had to treat the entire BSD distribution as if it were protected by ATT's licensing arrangements. This is probably the version that you got. In the 4.3Tahoe release, Keith Bostic (and, apparently, Kirk McKusick, but I've only had contact with Keith) did a great deal of work in getting large portions of UCB code certified as being free of ATT code, and therefore not subject to ATT licensing restrictions. John Gilmore helped, and Rick Adams did the grunt work of creating a release tape that has no non-free code (I believe; maybe Keith did that, too). With that the UCB Mail program, called mailx when ATT started to provide it with their releases, had a UCB Copyright on it. The UCB Copyright is basically "a freely-redistribute, don't use our name to sell it, don't blame us if it causes you any harm" copyright. The upshot is, the version you have is probably illegal, either it's covered by ATT license or someone stripped out the UCB Copyright. You can get a more current version on UUNET or by buying a tape from FSF, or by asking someone with access to either of those, or a 4.3Tahoe source tape. Apologies to anyone I might have slighted in my "who did what" summary, above. /r$ -- Please send comp.sources.unix-related mail to rsalz@uunet.uu.net. Use a domain-based address or give alternate paths, or you may lose out.