[TUHS] license

Michael Sokolov msokolov at ivan.Harhan.ORG
Mon Nov 4 16:05:23 AEST 2002


"Greg 'groggy' Lehey" <grog at lemis.com> wrote:

> I'll leave it to others to describe the early days.  The Berkeley
> Software License Agreement, generally called the BSD license, is
> pretty straightforward, though.

Wrong. The Berkeley Software License Agreement and what is known today as the
"BSD license" are two different things. The latter is the liberal header
Berkeley started prepending around 1988 to files that were totally theirs
without any Bell Labs code. The former was the paper license that went with the
4.3BSD and earlier tapes where Bell, Bell/Berkeley, and pure Berkeley parts
were not distinguished and the entire system could be used only by holders of
UNIX source licenses from AT&T. Although I've never seen it myself, the
Berkeley Software License Agreement could not have been like the liberal
header, it surely had stuff in it telling you that if you share it with anyone,
you must first verify that the recipient has a UNIX source license from AT&T,
etc.

MS



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