Subject: Re: 10e `distribution'

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 15 Jun 2000 23:05:04 -0400

8th-10th edition were Vax-only and ultimately derive
from 32V via Berkeley (together with our stuff).  This would be the argument
to use with SCO, given that 32v is already in Ancient Unix,
and also that SCO owns the direct descendant of the
streams stuff,  done by us originally, and now in SV.

 > Would Lucent be prepared to claim that they own those parts of 10e that
 > are not specifically part of 7e?

This is exactly  the part that's hard, not because of possible
Lucent claim on parts, but just because convincing Lucent to assert
such a claim will get people into a place they're not interested in exploring.
The problem isn't to protect our interest in the code, it's avoiding
an attempt to make claims on territory that has pretty much
been conceded to SCO, and whose terms are already reasonable.

I think I could fairly easily get a letter saying that Lucent has no problem
with v8 (or v10) availability provided that SCO made it clear that
they were OK with this under their ancient unix terms.

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From: Norman Wilson <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2000 10:16:18 -0400

To answer the easy questions (before I check out of my hotel
in Albuquerque, and hence go offline for another couple of days):

I'm pretty sure the kernel that turned into 8e was an old enough
4BSD (4.1a or something) that it required only a 32V license.
The sticking points are the stream I/O system, /proc, and
pjw's network file system, all of which were adopted in one
way or another by System V, even though they were changed
a lot in the process.  (I was going to write `mutated' but choked
on the mixed metaphor, and it's too close to `mutilated,' which is
true to some extent but not exactly fair.)

10e runs only on VAXes, and I believe never ran on anything
else; certainly the 4.xBSD kernel it is based on was full of VAX
dependencies.  So the `16-bit PDP-11' clause is no help.  The
`early 32-bit' clause probably applies to the base BSD kernel,
but not to the things that make it V8.

So, at least for the kernel, it's up to SCO.

And then there's all the code that runs in user mode.  The
most obvious distinguishing feature is all the jerq support;
that ended up in much-changed form in System V too.  There
are newer copies of things like troff and awk, some of which
may cause trouble, some not.  There are also some things that
were adopted from System V into the Research system; make
comes to mind.  That the code even in 10e is all at least
five years old (most of it probably at least ten) may help, but
I think we will still need to clear it with SCO.  It may be easier
for the V8 tape (if anyone still has a copy; come to think of it,
there may be one in Australia, at either Sydney Uni or UNSW,
I forget which) because that is much older.

On the other hand, although the ideas and some of the code
are in System V, the Research system certainly isn't the same
as System V, nor is it a successor system; so one could argue
that the Ancient UNIX license applies anyway.  I take that to
mean not that we shouldn't ask SCO explicitly but that they
can declare 8e-10e to be within the intent of the existing license
rather than drawing up a new one.

I am less worried about the work of sorting the code out
If I understand correctly, Warren's primary interest is historic
preservation, so weeding out `uninteresting' stuff is probably
unnecessary and in fact undesirable.  If we can weed out
the stuff that might make SCO or Lucent or AT&T unhappy if
released, that is probably good enough; if someone wants to
run the system, they can do the work.  (And, as I said earlier,
I'll be going through a form of the wretched make-it-all-work-again
exercise for my own purposes, though I plan to toss a lot of
old code aside.  Dennis will remember how much I like to do
that anyway.)

My snapshot is in two pieces: a copy of most of bowell's
/usr/src, leaving out stuff that was just there for reference;
a copy of r70's root and /usr with a few obvious cleanups,
e.g. I took care to leave the password file behind.  Both
were taken sometime in the summer of 1995.  They add up
to something like 200MB.  It's no skin off my nose to spend
a day or two assembling them and writing a few explanatory
notes for posterity and trimming away major subsystems that
we can't clear up the licensing for and so on.  The first question
is whether SCO will let us do it at all.

Dennis: do you know whether any of Andrew's old optical-disk
backups contain enough stuff to reconstruct a 9th-Edition-era
snapshot?  I can't remember just when he started that work.

Ironically, I'll be in Santa Cruz this Sunday, but that is presumably
not a good day to talk to SCO's lawyers, and in any rate I'd
rather not do business myself that day.

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From: Norman Wilson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 18 Jun 2000 19:46:23 -0400

Wasn't Dave Kapilow's Research-UNIX-on-Sun stuff done during
the Ninth Edition era?  If so, a copy of that tape might be of
interest.  I think Geoff Collyer had an official copy of that tape
when he was at U of T; I'll ask him.