[comp.unix.misc] license required for BSD unix?

ragnarok@leland.Stanford.EDU (douglas gray) (03/29/91)

Help.  If you want to use BSD, do you have to pay someone a fee?  How about
if you want the sources??  If so, who and how much?

Thx,
   Lisa Pilipenko (lpilipen@sadis02.sa.aflc.af.mil)


{This is being posted for me by a friend, please respond to me or
to the newsgroup, not to ragnarok.}

jik@athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens) (04/04/91)

  You need two licenses in order to be able to get the full BSD sources. 
First of all, you need a source license from AT&T.  This is *very* expensive
for commercial sites, and somewhat less expensive (although still not a
negligable amount of money) for educational institutions.

  Once you've got the AT&T license, you sign a license agreement with Berkeley.

  The reason you need an AT&T license is that the BSD source code has some
AT&T code still in it.  CSRG at Berkeley is trying to remove as much of that
code as possible for 4.4BSD; I don't know if they're going to succeed in
removing all of it.  If they do, the AT&T license will no longer be necessary,
and I suspect they'll charge only distribution costs for the sources.

  Incidentally, as they free parts of BSD of AT&T code, the put it onto
uunet.uu.net in the /bsd-sources directory (although I don't know how often
they update it).  So there is a lot of code there you can browse through that
is freely redistributable.

  In any case, the right people to contact to talk to about questions like
these are:

        Distribution Coordinator
        Computer Systems Research Group
        Computer Science Division, EECS
        University of California
        Berkeley, California 94720

	(415) 642-7780

	bsd-dist@Berkeley.EDU

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