On Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 3:33 PM, Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
Perhaps the most extreme was MIT, whose
lawyers believed it could not be adequately protected in
academia and forbade its use there.
Doug - that is interesting. Do you know the time frame of the
banishment? Noel any memories of what allowed it be used? Clearly, once
the restriction was removed, it spread.
At CMU, for the OS course, we had a sign a document with the university
stating something that we understood it was AT&Ts IP and we were using it
as a teaching tool. I remember thinking that whole thing was weird, the
students could not get accounts on the OS development machines for the
course to get get source access -- but I already had one because I was
working for the EE dept before I took the official OS course and had been
kernel hacking and already helped write fsck with Ted that summer before.
So it felt like the CMU lawyers were trying close the barn doors after they
were already open with a couple of us (their were probably 5 or so that
were in that same spot).
Maybe if we can find Bill Wulf, whom I think was the one that shepherded
that document through the CMU lawyers. His wife, Anita was teaching the
course at the time; IIRC. He might remember.