[TUHS] early INGRES licenses?

Jeremy C. Reed reed at reedmedia.net
Tue Aug 2 09:56:28 AEST 2011


What type of licensing agreements (maybe informal) were used for the 
early INGRES tape distributions? I am trying to see if they were an 
example for BSD or how compared with early BSD.

The BSD-style licenses were not introduced until 1987 and later 
(starting in but not completed in 4.3BSD-Tahoe). But various earlier BSD 
(distribution) components did have open source licenses long before that 
-- such as Eric Allman's trek (circa 1977) in 1BSD and MIT's X 
components (1985) shipped with 4.3BSD.

The COPYRIGHT for INGRES 6.3/-1 (February 1, 1981) source shipped with 
2.79BSD (Febuary 1981) indicated it was not open source: "... may not be 
reproduced or disclosed without the prior written permission of the 
owner."

My BSD history book in progress has at least 15+ pages of examples and 
commentary and interview quotes about the history of proprietary and 
open source licensing in early BSDs. I also plan to research the 
history of licensing for W and early X.



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