27 Jun
1996
27 Jun
'96
2:06 a.m.
All,
I just received a very pleasing letter from Dion L. Johnson II, the
Product Manager at SCO, about the legal status of the PDP UNIXs. I've included
his email and my response below. If I can get a legally authorative statement
on paper from SCO, I'll pass it on to you all, especially Steven Schultz.
Cheers,
Warren
In atricle by Dion:
SCO owns the licensing rights all versions of the UNIX system, or
so our legal folks tell me. Now, of course there are many
derivative, licensed versions, and some of the holders of those
licenses have rights to sublicense. In the case of BSD
enhancements, the Berkeley additions are owned by the Regents of
the University of California, and I believe the UCB license terms
are well known.
As for your friends who have rescued ancient PDP machines... I
am confident that SCO would cheerfully encourage them to run UNIX
on these antiques without any payment to us. I cant quite
officially give that permission myself, but I can speculate that
SCO certainly would not mind.
So go for it. Does this help?
-Dion
Dion L. Johnson II - The Santa Cruz Operation, Inc. dionj(a)sco.com
SCO Product Manager - Development Systems and Various Other Stuff
400 Encinal St. Santa Cruz, CA 95061 FAX: 408-427-5417 Voice: 408-427-7565
Dion, thanks very much for your email, in fact I'm ecstatic! I know this
could be a tricky legal minefield, so if possible could SCO draft a letter
(and run it past their lawyers) which sets out exactly what you said above.
In particular, you said that ``SCO would cheerfully encourage them to run UNIX
on these antiques without any payment to us''. Does this mean I can legally
distribute the source code to the PDP versions of UNIX, and to anybody? or
just to people who own PDP-11s. There are PDP-11 emulators available, so
it is conceivable that people who don't even have a real PDP-11 might like
to try UNIX out on these emulators. If to anybody, then I assume this means
the source is legally owned by SCO but freely distributable?
I really appreciate your offer of making these old versions of UNIX
available, but given the legal status of the code to this point, I would
like to cover myself with an officially blessed and signed document from SCO.
Let me know what you can do, and many many thanks again for this!
Cheers,
Warren