On Fri, Mar 10, 2017 at 8:15 AM, Jason Stevens <jsteve@superglobalmegacorp.com> wrote:

That almost reminds me to ask about the whole "open" Stanford 68000 board that became the Cisco AGS, and SUN 100.. and I think SGi 1000

Jason -- I'm not sure what you are trying to say. It was a different time, different culture, different rules. Note: Please I'm not accusing you of this, but I worry you are getting dangerous close to an error that I see made by a lot of folks that grew in the time of the GPL and the "Open Source Culture." My apologies in advance if you think I'm going a little too far, but I want to make something clear that seems to have been lost in time and culture. I do not want to be see as harassing or "shaming" in anyway way. I want to make a point for everyone since the words we use do matter (and I realize I screw them up myself often enough)..

I am fairly certain that the "SUN board" - aka the Stanford University Network 68000 board, like UNIX itself was licensed IP. You are correct that the schematics (like the UNIX sources) were well known at the time and "open" in the sense that all of the licenses had them. It was not hard to find papers with a much of the design described. In fact Andy had worked on a similar set of boards when he was a CMU a few years earlier for what we called the "distributed front-end" project (the earlier version was much weaker and had started as Intel chip of sometime which I have forgotten and switched to the 68000 at some point - Phil Karn might remember and even have a copy, I think my copy has been lost to time).

Anyway, to build and sell a Multibus board based on Andy's design that he did at Stanford as a grad student, you needed a license from Stanford. You are correct a lot of firms, particularly Cisco, later VLSI Technology - ney Sun Micro Systems, Imagen, and host of took out licenses to build that board. Thus a lot of companies built "JAWS" (just another workstation - so called "3M systems" with a disk), or sometimes diskless terminals as Andy had imagined it in his papers, or purpose built boxes such the AGS router and the Imagen printers.

But I flinch a little when I see people call the "SUN" an "open" design. It was "well know" but it was not what we might call "Free and Open" today.

I admit you just said "open" in your reply to Charlie and may have meant something different; but so many people today leave the "free" off when they say "open." i.e. People often incorrect deny that Unix was open as it actually always was from the beginning -- if you had a license, it just was not "free" to get same. My point is that I believe a license for the "SUN" was from Stanford was not "free" either. Same with the the "MIPS" chip technology of a few years later also from Stanford.

So, I would have been happier if you had said something that had included the words "licensed from Stanford."

Anyway, Research Universities, such as MIT, Stanford and frankly my own CMU, have long been known for charging for licenses (not always mind you). In fact, I laud my other institution, because I have always said the real father of "free and open source" is my old thesis advisor, the late Don Pederson. In the late 1960s, he founded the UCB EE "Industrial Liaison Program" which was the auspicious institution that original "BSD" tape would be released years later. When he first released the first version of "Simulation Program for Integrate Circuit Evaluation" - aka SPICE, in approx 67 time frame "dop" said:

"I always have given away our work. It means we get to go in the back door and talk to the engineers. My colleagues at some of the other places license there work and they have go in the front door like any other salesman."

When the CS group was added to EE a few years later, their was history, mechanism, etc. Berkeley had been release source code for a lots of different project. The Berkeley Software Distribution for Unix V6 was just the the drop for UNIX - who knew at the time the life it wold spawn (although I note SPICE is still being used, so even with UNIX's success, SPICE still hold the record for the "longest" used" BSD release code). Anyway, "

p" used to love to remind the students of that mantra. And he came up with it 20-25 years before Eric Raymond ever wrote his book and started equating "open" with "Stallmanism." ;-)

I hope have a great one, and I hope I did not offend.

Clem