Subject: Re: canonical answer about Sixth and Seventh Edition

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 1 Nov 1995 21:52:52 EST

I tried a couple of drafts of that note; earlier ones were more explicit
about my guesses about how the envelope might be pushed.
I finally wrote what I sent under the assumption that the position
would be published.

After thinking about things, I'll explain my view of the situation;
it really is my view, and although I'm a bit more confident
about the position of AT&T than that of the other parties,
these are simply estimations.

AT&T doesn't care at all about what happens with early (or for that
matter late) Unix versions except that the company not be enmeshed
in problems.  This translates to: if you officially ask about something,
you might not hear an answer, but if you get one, it will say "this is
not our business."

USL cared, for reasons I can see but don't fully appreciate, about early versions,
in particular 32V (on which the BSD distributions were based).  USL
did sue BSDI and then UC Berkeley for selling and distributing
system distributions allegedly free of AT&T/USL code.  There were
many technical aspects in the suit involving details of copyright
and other matters.  My reading of the motivation for the suit is that
USL was not worried much about BSDI as a direct competitor, but
rather about the possibility that Unix as a whole (and in particular
their current System V product) might end up in the public domain;
specifically, that one or more of their large customers might
say "This material is in the public domain; there's no copyright,
there's no trade secret.  We won't pay."  Thus the BSDI suit was
mainly to establish the fact that they would fight for their rights.
The suit was in fact finally settled out of court, in a way that
cast some doubt on USL's ability to hold copyright and trade
secret claims on 32V, but did establish that they were willing
to fight for them.  USL people believe they won the battle they were
actually fighting.  BSDI also won because they're still in business,
after agreeing to make rather minimal changes in their product.

My reading is that SCO, the about-to-be owner of the Unix code
that descends from the early Bell Labs research editions, is not
going to be excessively concerned with educational, research,
or historical uses of these early versions, though they might
well be worried about commercial use.

I'm certain that right now (just before the sale is consummated)
neither Novell nor SCO will make many promises; more likely
they'll just be confused.

	Dennis

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 1 Nov 1995 22:00:48 EST

About specifics:

I have the 5 and 6 stuff in a directory.  Probably simplest is to
put it in a directory accessible for FTP.  It is 4 files in gzipped-tar
format, 2.8MB.  Let's schedule a time for making it visible.

About Helbekkmo of NSE (and generally about proving source
licenses).  I don't know how to do this.  I would be inclined to
believe people writing from universities who say they have
BSD licenses.

	D.