Subject: early source

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 1 Jul 1997 22:59:04 -0400

Hi,

Good luck on your quest.  I don't know the best approach to getting
the material out; I'm not sure that a petition is the best, but I
certainly support it.  Let me tell you what I encountered in recent
years in getting the Sixth Edition out.

As a brief guide: remember that
 AT&T spun off USL as a mostly-owned subsidiary with Unix
  software as its main product
 USL was then sold to Novell
 Novell then sold this business to SCO

It was several years ago that Peter Salus and Berny Goodheart began
pushing to republish the Lions commentaries and the accompanying 6th
edition source.  I think this started after AT&T had sold USL to
Novell, but it might have been even before.  I tried to use my best
offices to encourage this, but we didn't get anywhere.  In part, I
suppose, things were complicated by the USL vs BSDI and later vs UC
Berkeley lawsuit, which definitely made people nervous about rights
and what might happen if even historical stuff became available.  (I
tried to help with that too, also to no evident avail on my part, but
the issue dissolved with no effect except the expenditure of a lot of
money and some ill-will.)  The attitude of the people I talked to (on
the advice of their lawyers) was sympathetic to publishing, but they
were worried that they might be jeopardising their ownership rights in
the current code.  They were well aware that no one could possibly
produce a competing product by starting from the Sixth Edition, but
thought more along these lines: if we (effectively) put this
>10-year-old material in the public domain, do we create the
possibility that someone will successfully claim that our current
product, a derivative of it, is also public domain?  Everyone involved
admitted that this was a slim possibility, but didn't see any
advantage in taking the risk or spending a lot of time analyzing it.

At about this point (after the sale of USL to Novell), I carefully
read the contract that created USL as a mostly-owned subsidiary of
AT&T.  It seemed to me to say clearly that the rights that were
transferred were to Unix System V as of about 1982.  Thus, I thought,
AT&T (and its Bell Labs, which we were then), owned the rights to
earlier versions and could do with them what we pleased.  Therefore, I
applied for a general release of the Sixth Edition software.  After
bouncing around for a while, this release was denied, again because of
lawyer caution.  The contract contained a phrase approximately "and
prerelease versions" which they thought might conceivably be
interpreted to apply to the Sixth Edition.  There was no economic
interest on AT&T's part, and no objection the release except not
wanting to be sued, an event admitted to be unlikely, but not so
unlikely that they were willing to sign.  The best I was able to get
was a letter saying that AT&T had no objection to republishing the
Lions material and the source, but also saying that USL would have to
agree as well.

Later, Novell agreed to sell USL to SCO, so we all tried again.
Salus, Goodheart, I and others wrote several letters to old Unix hands
at SCO, in particular Mike Tilson and Doug Michels.  For the first
several months they expressed considerable sympathy, but their own
lawyers were also worried about consequences, and since our approach
to them was made after the sale agreement but before the closing,
everyone at SCO was much more engaged with current events than with
history.

Happily, once SCO was actually in control, the efforts by Peter and
Berny reached fruition, and Mike T. and Doug M. quelled the fears of
their lawyers.  So the Lions book was republished.

More recently, Bob Supnik collected or commissioned interpreters for
several old machines from Digital and Data General and also permission
to distribute binary versions of various operating systems for them,
the Unix ones from from SCO. I wasn't involved in whatever
negotiations he conducted.

I've formed these impressions in helping to make available historical
material.

1) SCO is interested in keeping nominal rights to Unix source code as
early as the Sixth Edition research stuff, but they are generally
friendly and cooperative.

2) I am going to take the (unilateral) attitude that anything earlier
than the Sixth Edition is our property, to be made available for
scholarly purposes as I manage to work up energy to curate it.

I don't at all disagree with the purpose of the petition and support
it.  Be sure to continue with a positive and non-confrontational approach
to SCO.

	Dennis

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 1997 00:10:59 -0400

I would push for a non-cash arrangement.  The stuff at the plan 9
site (the 4-disk set) and the Inferno download agreement show what
we've been able to manage.  This has seemed to satisfy the lawyers
locally.  No one smart is under the illusion that they can really
make money from this, they just don't want to do any uncompensated
work and worry about losing some sort of rights in what they do
make money from.  I guess the offers to pay are evidence of interest,
though.

Tilson is the person more friendly to Unix history and better
known to me personally, but he made it clear in my negotiations
that Michels was more in control of this (at least at the time;
things change fast).  I don't know Dion Johnson or where he fits in
but if you're making progress with him, continue!

I've been putting up stuff, mainly documents, under my home
page at
  http://cm.bell-labs.com/cs/who/dmr
The latest discoveries (not there yet) are Ken's own B manual,
and his and my document on QED (the most baroque QED ever).
Already there are versions of some other papers on early things.

As to what I have.  There is a version of the OS source as of
about August 1973, retrieved from a DECtape.  This is the earliest
currently machine-readable system source in existence, I'm pretty sure.

Other treasures:  Shamim Pirzada did most of a PhD thesis on Unix
as an exemplar of software evolution for Imperial College (London)
that (in the part I have) contains a pretty good account of details
of history up to about 1988.

I'll continue scanning this stuff in.

	Dennis