<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff">This is UNIX history, but since the Internet's history and Unix history are so intertwined, I'm going to risk the wrath of the IH moderators to try to explain, as I was one of the folks who was at the table in those the times and participated in my small way in both events: the birth of the Internet and the spreading of the UNIX IP.</font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff"><br></font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff">More details can be found in a paper I did a few years ago: </font><span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"><a href="https://technique-societe.cnam.fr/colloque-international-unix-en-france-et-aux-etats-unis-innovation-diffusion-et-appropriation--945215.kjsp">https://technique-societe.cnam.fr/colloque-international-unix-en-france-et-aux-etats-unis-innovation-diffusion-et-appropriation--945215.kjsp</a><font color="#0000ff"> [If you cannot find it and are interested send me email off list and I'll forward it].</font></span></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff"><br></font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff">And ... if people want to continue this discussion -- please, please, move it to the more appropriate COFF mailing list: <a href="https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff">https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff</a> - which I have CC'ed in this reply.</font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff"><br></font></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Fri, Mar 8, 2024 at 11:32 PM Greg Skinner via Internet-history <<a href="mailto:internet-history@elists.isoc.org" target="_blank">internet-history@elists.isoc.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">Forwarded for Barbara<br>
<br>
> I will admit your response is confusing me. My post only concerns what I think I remember as a problem in getting BSD UNIX, in particular the source code. Nothing about getting something we wanted to use on a hardware platform from one of the commercial vendors. We needed the BSD source but got hung up.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff">Let me see if I can explain better ...</font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff"><br></font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff">Assuming you were running BSD UNIX on a Vax, your team would have needed two things:</font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><ul><li><font color="#0000ff">an AT&T License for 32/V [Research Version 7 -- port to a Vax/780 at AT&T] and a </font></li><li><font color="#0000ff">a license for BSD 3, later 4, then 4.1, <i>etc</i>., from the Regents of the University of CA.</font></li></ul><font color="#0000ff">The first license gave your team core a few rights from AT&T: </font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><ol><li><font color="#0000ff"> the right to run UNIX binaries on a single CPU (which was named in your license) </font></li><li><font color="#0000ff">the right to look at and modify the sources, </font></li><li><font color="#0000ff">the right the create derivative works from the AT&T IP, and </font></li><li><font color="#0000ff">the right to exchange your derivative works with others people that held a similar license from AT&T. </font></li></ol><font color="#0000ff">[AT&T had been forced to allow this access (license) to their IP under the rules of the 1956 consent decree - see paper for more details, but remember, as part of the consent decree allow it to have a legal monopoly on the phone system, AT&T had to make its IP available to the US Gov -- which I'm guessing the crux of Barbara's question/observation]. </font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span style="color:rgb(0,0,255)"><br></span></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span style="color:rgb(0,0,255)">For </span><font color="#0000ff">not-for-profits </font><span style="color:rgb(0,0,255)">(University/Research), a small fee was allowed to be charged (order of 1-2 hundred $s) to process the paperwork and copy the mag tape. But their IP came without any warranty, and you had to hold AT&T harmless if you used it. In those days, we referred to this as </span><i style="color:rgb(0,0,255);text-decoration-line:underline">the UNIX IP was abandoned on your doorstep.</i><span style="color:rgb(0,0,255)"> BTW: This license allowed the research sites to move AT&T derivative work (binaries) within their site freely. Still, if you look at the license carefully, most had a restriction (often/usually ignored at the universities) that the sources were supposed to only be available on the original CPU named in their specific license.</span><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff"><br></font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff">Thus, if you were a University license, no fees were charged to run the AT&T IP on other CPUs --> however, the licensees were not allowed to use it for "commercial" users at the University [BTW: this clause was often ignored, although a group of us at CMU hackers in the late 1970s famously went on strike until the Unversity obtained at least one commercial license]. The agreement was that a single CPU should be officially bound for all commercial use for that institution. I am aware that Case-Western got a similar license soon after CMU did (their folks found out about the CMU strike/license). But I do not know if MIT, Standford, or UCB officials came clean on that part and paid for a commercial license (depending on the type of license, its cost was the order of $20K-25K for the first CPU and an order of $7K-10K for each CPU afterward - each of these "additional cpu' could also have the sources - but named in an appendix for each license with AT&T). I believe that some of the larger state schools like Penn State, Rutgers, Purdue, and UW started to follow that practice by the time Unix started to spread around each campus.</font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff"><br></font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff">That said, a different license for UNIX-based IP could be granted by the Regents of the University of CA and managed by its 'Industrial Laison's Office" at UCB (the 'IOL' - the same folks that brought licenses for tools like SPICE, SPLICE, MOTIS,<i> et al</i>). This license gave the holder the right to examine and use the UCB's derivative works on anything as long as you acknowledged that you got that from UCB and held the Regents blameless [we often called this the 'dead-fish license' -- <u><i>you could make a chip, make a computer, or even wrap dead-fish in it.</i></u> But you had to say you started with something from the Regents, but they were not to be blamed for what you did with it].</font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff"><br></font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff">The Regents were exercising rights 3 and 4 from AT&T. Thus, a team who wanted to obtain the Berkeley Software Distribution for UNIX (<i>a.k.a</i>. BSD) needed to demonstrate that they held the appropriate license from AT&T [send a copy of the signature page from your license to the ILO] before UCB would release the bits. They also had a small processing fee to the IOL in the order of $1K. [The original BSD is unnumbered, although most refer to it today as 1BSD to differentiate it from later BSD releases for UNIX].</font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff"><br></font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff">Before I go on, in those times, the standard way we operated was that you needed to have a copy of someone else's signature page to share things. In what would later become USENIX (truth here - I'm an ex-president of the same), you could only get invited and come to a conference if you were licensed from AT&T. That was not a big deal. We all knew each other. FWIW: at different times in my career, I have had a hanging file in a cabinet with a copy of the number of these pages from different folks, with whom I would share mag tapes (remember this is pre-Internet, and many of the folks using UNIX were not part of the ARPAnet).</font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff"><br></font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><span style="color:rgb(0,0,255)">However, the song has other verses that make this a little confusing.</span><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff"><br></font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff">If your team obtained a<i><u> commercial use license</u></i> from AT&T, they could further obtain a <u><i>commercial redistribution license</i></u>. This was initially granted for the Research Seventh Edition. It was later rewritten (with the business terms changing each time) for what would eventually be called System III[1], and then the different System V releases. The price of the redistribution license for V7 was $150K, plus a sliding scale per CPU you ran the AT&T IP, depending on the number of CPUs you needed. With this, the single CPU for the source restriction was removed.</font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff"><br></font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff">So ... if you had a redistribution license, you could also get a license from the Regents, and as long as you obeyed their rules, you could sell a copy of UNIX to run on any licensed target. Traditionally, hardware is part of the same purchase when purchased from a firm like DEC, IBM, Masscomp,<i> etc</i>. However, separate SW licenses were sold via firms such as Microsoft and Mt. Xinu. The purchaser of <u><i>a binary license</i></u> from one of those firms did not have the right to do anything but use the AT&T derivative work. If your team had a binary licensee, you could not obtain any of the BSD distributions until the so-called 'NET2" BSD release [and I'm going to ignore the whole AT&T/BSDi/Regents case here as it is not relevant to Barbara's question/comment].</font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff"><br></font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff">So the question is, how did a DoD contractor, be it BBN, Ford Aerospace, SRI, etc., originally get access to UNIX IP? Universities and traditional research teams could get a research license. Commercial firms like DEC needed a commercial licensee. Folks with DoD contracts were in a hazy area. The original v5 commercial licensee was written for Rand, a DoD contractor. <span style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif"> However, as discussed here in the IH mailing list and elsewhere, some places like BBN had access to the core UNIX IP as part of their DoD contracts.</span> I believe Ford Aerospace was working with AT&T together as part of another US Gov project - which is how UNIX got there originally (Ford Aero could use it for that project, but not the folks at Ford Motors, for instance]. </font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff"><br></font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff">The point is, if you access the <i><u>IP indirectly</u></i> such as that, then your site probably did not have a negotiated license with a signature page to send to someone.</font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff"><br></font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff">@Barbara, I can not say for sure, but if this was either a PDP-11 or a VAX and you wanted one of the eBSDs, I guess/suspect that maybe your team was dealing with an indirect path to AT&T licensing -- your site license might have come from a US Gov contract, not directly. So trying to get a BSD tape directly from the IOL might have been more difficult without a signature page.</font><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff"><br></font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff">So, rolling back to the original. You get access to BSD sources, but you had to demonstrate to the IOL folks in UCB's Cory Hall that you were legally allowed access to the AT&T IP in source code form. That demonstration was traditionally fulfilled with a xerographic copy of the signature page for your institution, which the IOL kept on file. That said, if you had legal access to the AT&T IP by indirect means, I do not know how the IOL completed that check or what they needed to protect the Regents.</font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff"><br></font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff">Clem</font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff"><br></font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff"><br></font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff"><br></font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff"><br></font></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif"><font color="#0000ff">1.] What would be called a System from a marketing standpoint was originally developed as PWB 3.0. This was the system a number of firms, including my own, were discussing with AT&T at the famous meetings at 'Ricky's Hyatt' during the price (re)negotiations after the original V7 redistribution license. </font></div></div></div>