20 Mar
2003
20 Mar
'03
1:08 a.m.
On Wednesday, 19 March 2003 at 9:40:30 -0800, Steven M. Schultz wrote:
After Caldera released the Ancient UNIX license last January, 2BSD
must be free, unless I'm missing something.
Right, but that's what Caldera released.
My understanding (and I'm pretty sure it's correct) is that it
replaces the old AT&T license for the specified products, including
all AT&T precursors of [1-4]BSD.
I have a small question, which I hope you can
clarify for me. I'm in a
little argument with a person involved in NetBSD.
Ummm, I'm not a lawyer of course...
He claims that NetBSD is the oldest free BSD
still alive, which I reacted
to since it was my belief that 2BSD now is free.
But is 2BSD free? That I don't know. It is more free than it was
a long time ago but This have
resulted in the claim that Berkley is the one that is
restricting 2BSD, which was news to me. Is this in any way correct? The
* Copyright (c) 1986 Regents of the University of California.
* All rights reserved. The Berkeley software License Agreement
* specifies the terms and conditions for redistribution.
That was the earlier version of the BSD license - when you had to have
a ATT/USL/BellLabs license in order to obtain BSD at all.
I am not sure I have a copy of the original UCB license but I think
part of it involved having a ATT/USL license. Can you
clarify this for me, please? :-)
Does the current state of the Caldera/SCO/whatever license override
any existing licenses? THAT I do not know. If that is the case
then I would say that 2BSD is indeed free, on the other hand if people
are still legally constrained by the earlier license then 2BSD is
not totally free. Earlier versions of NetBSD would not be free
either because they contain "encumbered code" from the era when a
ATT/USL license was required.
They should now be free for the same reason.
Greg
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