3 Sep
2023
3 Sep
'23
9:09 p.m.
On 2023-09-03 08:40, Marc Donner wrote:
My team at Morgan Stanley had a source license to
SunOS in the early
‘90s. We tried to secure a license to AIX source but never
succeeded.
We had access to the AIX source at my work place. The AIX 3.2.5 source
delivery included a build machine because we had requirements to be able
to support and redistribute AIX 3.2.5 for up to 20 years. As I recall,
it required a lot of high level negotiations between us and IBM to get
that.
Access was limited to select people on an air-gapped machine. The source
code itself was locked away on 8mm tape and required signatures to check
it out.
IBM did have a public announcement letter for AIX 3.2.5 source access.
http://bio.gsi.de/DOCS/AIX/ENUSZP93-0158.printable.html
We also had access to the various AIX versions that we had to support
our government customers. I know we had access to AIX 4.3.3, 5.1,5,2,
and 5.3 source code. One of our developers would fix bugs that he found
and file PMRs to tell the AIX developers what exactly to fix. A strip
command change to support very large executables took 18 months for them
to fix because they didn't understand why failing to strip very large
binaries was a problem.
-Andy Wallis