On Mon, May 17, 2021 at 7:33 PM Jason Stevens <jsteve@superglobalmegacorp.com> wrote:

Nobody ever said peep when I ‘mashed’ enough 386BSD and what was available from NetBSD 0.9 and the NetBSD 0.8 to make 0.8 work… The closest I got is ‘why do you want that we have version 17!’ or whatever $HEAD is . I guess in the same way I was more interested in preserving 386BSD 0.0, and again nobody ever told me to stop.

I guess in the same way nobody told me to stop making Mach 2.6 available, or even Darwin 0.3 for i386.

I wanted to take that IBM 4.4BSD and try to replace enough of 386BSD 0.1 pl32 to have something more akin to ‘real’ 4.4 BSD. Although I have a bunch of things I need to wrap up before I take that on (people are actually looking for bug fixes for Quake II on MS-DOS of all things….).

I don’t think its exactly policed like 1984, although I think people are more excited about RIAA/MPAA than things like Unix.

Part of the problem too isn't so much who owns the copyrights, but whether or not the copyrights for the

V7 and earlier actually exist and are valid. One of the reasons the BSD suit was settled was at the time

the judge strongly telegraphed that there wasn't a valid copyright by western union based on the copyright

law at its time of creation.... So even the question of who owns the unix copyright might not be as simple

as all that... The stuff is so old, there's no money in removing any of the ambiguity for the current copyright

holders (to the extent that it is valid), so we're left with a lot of possibility, but no certainty. Though given the

Supreme Court's latest 'fair use' rulings, it wouldn't surprise me if were it to wind up in court if that didn't

further weaken the answer to the point where it just doesn't matter what the underlying details are, copying

and making a derived work would be OK. Though that's my own layman's best guess...

Warner

(shrug)

From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey
Sent: Saturday, May 16, 2020 9:41 AM
To: Warner Losh
Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Status of Net/2

On Friday, 15 May 2020 at 18:49:44 -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
> What's the current status of net/2?
>
> I ask because I have a FreeBSD 1.1.5.1 CVS repo that I'd like to make
> available. Some of the files in it are encumbered, though, and the
> University of California has communicated that fact. But what does
that
> actually mean now that V7 has been released and that's what the files
were
> based on? Are they no longer encumbered?

To the best of my knowledge, Net/2 would be covered by the license
granted by Caldera on 23 January 2002:

Caldera International, Inc. hereby grants a fee free license that
includes the rights use, modify and distribute this named source
code, including creating derived binary products created from the
source code. The source code for which Caldera International,
Inc. grants rights are limited to the following UNIX Operating
Systems that operate on the 16-Bit PDP-11 CPU and early versions of
the 32-Bit UNIX Operating System, with specific exclusion of UNIX
System III and UNIX System V and successor operating systems:

32-bit 32V UNIX
16 bit UNIX Versions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

I'm attaching the PDF of the license agreement, along with an email
from Dion Johnson to wkt (misspelt as wht) the following day.

It doesn't specifically address any particular operating system, but
it was my understanding that this would free all BSD versions.

Greg
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