On Sun, Feb 19, 2017 at 7:29 PM, Nick Downing <downing.nick@gmail.com> wrote:

This is all very interesting, and I take it the source is available?

I have not looked in a while, they have been in the past. The RI version in particular was floating around the open parts of the Internet as recently as 10-15 years ago, if my memory serves me. I suspect, that the darker areas have other versions too. We played with/considered the RI version at one of my startups but eventually decided against as it was too big/heavy for what we needed at the time. Google is your friend, as is the Internet Way Back machines but I do expect if you poke around you'll find them.

As for licenses, OSF/1 [from OSF itself] was based off the SVR3 AT&T license from an AT&T standpoint. If that is now clear, then it should be also, but I'm not a lawyer nor play one on TV etc... I'll leave that to other more knowledgable about what has been released and what has not.

[As a side note, I do remember that all of Sun, IBM and HP had fully bought out AT&T licenses meaning they could do whatever they wanted with the IP, but DEC never took that step. However, when HP bought Compaq later and they started to shipping Tru64 et al under the HP licenses].

Anyway, Tru64 is based on OSF/1 but also has a lot of DEC proprietary things (like TruClusters and anything Alpha specific) that goes beyond the based OSF license, so you need the HP clearance before any of that can be made available [same is true for HP/UX of course]. To my knowledge, DEC/Compaq/HP never released the sources to Tru64 (or HP/UX) to the world they way Sun did for Solaris, which in the case of Tru64 is sort of shame - there is some every good stuff in there like the file systems, the lock managers, cluster scaling, messaging, etc - which would be nice to compare to today's solutions. Since HP did have a bought out AT&T license, that clearly could have done so, but I do not think anyone left there to make that decision - sigh.

That said, VMS is still kept under lock and key, although HP has licensed it to "VMS, Inc" in the last year (who is now supplying support for same for Alpha, IA64 and announced a future INTEL*64 version amazingly). I bring this up, because we might be able to find out from those folks whom that are working with at HP and see if we can get one of the HP execs that is working with VMS to help to sign off on Tru64. I don't know.

Which bring me to another though ....question for this fine group.... Sun had a bought out A&T&T SVR4 license. This was how they were able to make Solaris open source because they owned both the Sun parts and had the rights to release the part they had licenses from AT&T. Does any one know what became of the non-Sun version SVR4? Did the rest of it, ever get released?

Since it sounds like we are digging up a few of the 386 flavors, I thinking that Warren needs to add an "x86" directory on the save level as the current VAX and PDP-11 versions. Then under that have "Distributions" - with an SRV4/i386 tape assuming we could find same.

Same of course for SVR3 - which would make the some of the other versions less murky if it was released, since I'm fairly sure that the SVR3 license was the one that most commercial UNIX versions shipped under for the longest amount of time. If it was released, many of of the versions of UNIX from the other "dead branches" - say, early Masscomp, Apollo's first UNIX attempts, Pyramid's Universe stuff, etc would have a little clear path to being able to me made available.

Clem