> All,
> I just received a very pleasing letter from Dion L. Johnson II, the
> Product Manager at SCO, about the legal status of the PDP UNIXs. I've included
> his email and my response below. If I can get a legally authorative statement
> on paper from SCO, I'll pass it on to you all, especially Steven Schultz.
Not that I wan't to sound pessimistic, but there are several
miles between "would not mind", and "legally allowed".
>From what I read into his letter, he's saying that he don't think
SCO would take legal actions against us, but at the same time they
won't probably make it officially legal.
And your reply, hoping that they'll say that "Unix is legally owned by
SCO, but freely distributable", is really reaching for the sky... :-)
Anyway, keep trying, it would be very nice if they really did write
such a paper.
Johnny
All,
I just received a very pleasing letter from Dion L. Johnson II, the
Product Manager at SCO, about the legal status of the PDP UNIXs. I've included
his email and my response below. If I can get a legally authorative statement
on paper from SCO, I'll pass it on to you all, especially Steven Schultz.
Cheers,
Warren
In atricle by Dion:
>
> SCO owns the licensing rights all versions of the UNIX system, or
> so our legal folks tell me. Now, of course there are many
> derivative, licensed versions, and some of the holders of those
> licenses have rights to sublicense. In the case of BSD
> enhancements, the Berkeley additions are owned by the Regents of
> the University of California, and I believe the UCB license terms
> are well known.
>
> As for your friends who have rescued ancient PDP machines... I
> am confident that SCO would cheerfully encourage them to run UNIX
> on these antiques without any payment to us. I cant quite
> officially give that permission myself, but I can speculate that
> SCO certainly would not mind.
>
> So go for it. Does this help?
> -Dion
>Dion L. Johnson II - The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. dionj(a)sco.com
>SCO Product Manager - Development Systems and Various Other Stuff
>400 Encinal St. Santa Cruz, CA 95061 FAX: 408-427-5417 Voice: 408-427-7565
Dion, thanks very much for your email, in fact I'm ecstatic! I know this
could be a tricky legal minefield, so if possible could SCO draft a letter
(and run it past their lawyers) which sets out exactly what you said above.
In particular, you said that ``SCO would cheerfully encourage them to run UNIX
on these antiques without any payment to us''. Does this mean I can legally
distribute the source code to the PDP versions of UNIX, and to anybody? or
just to people who own PDP-11s. There are PDP-11 emulators available, so
it is conceivable that people who don't even have a real PDP-11 might like
to try UNIX out on these emulators. If to anybody, then I assume this means
the source is legally owned by SCO but freely distributable?
I really appreciate your offer of making these old versions of UNIX
available, but given the legal status of the code to this point, I would
like to cover myself with an officially blessed and signed document from SCO.
Let me know what you can do, and many many thanks again for this!
Cheers,
Warren
In atricle by Jacob Ritorto:
> Warren,
> I have three 600' 9-track 800bpi tapes marked (in pen) UNIX V6
> 4000 blocks. One Source, one Object, one Documentation. I've tried
> using ROLLIN to restore them, but it expects a filename, which I can't
> find. I did do an RT11 dump of the first few blocks of the tapes, which
> revealed an ascii 'd' as the first byte, then a series of decending
> bytes. It didn't look like a file structure or a filename. All the
> tapes had the same first block. I tried to boot the tapes directly on an
> 11/34. No luck. I tried to DIR them from rt11, but, of course, rt
> couldn't find any directory info. There's definately unix stuff on the
> tapes--I saw it in the RT11 device dump. Dates in some of the source
> files are around 1974 or 1976, if I recall correctly.
> What do I need to do to get these tapes back onto disk and
> running? I'm assuming they restore to RK05 disks because the labels say
> 4000 blocks. I have 4 rk05 drives and lots of packs. BTW, the tape
> drive I'm using is a TU10 with standard address and vector.
> Your help would be greatly appreciated.
> Jacob Ritorto
Jacob, I'm passing this onto a bunch of PDP Unix people, as I don't have
the hardware & RT11 experience to tell you how to install v6 from the
tapes. Yes, the 3 tapes are RK05 pack images, I have on-line copies here
if that can be of any help to you. Can you raw dump the tapes to RK05s
using RT11?
Can anybody help Jacob out here? We also have v7, 2.9BSD and 2.11BSD here.
What hardware do you have?
Best of luck,
Warren Toomey
