[TUHS] Status of Net/2

[Warner Losh]

On Mon, May 17, 2021 at 7:33 PM Jason Stevens <
jsteve at superglobalmegacorp.com> wrote:

> Nobody ever said peep when I ‘mashed’ enough 386BSD and what was available
> from NetBSD 0.9 and the NetBSD 0.8 to make 0.8 work…  The closest I got is
> ‘why do you want that we have version 17!’ or whatever $HEAD is .  I guess
> in the same way I was more interested in preserving 386BSD 0.0, and again
> nobody ever told me to stop.
>
>
>
> I guess in the same way nobody told me to stop making Mach 2.6 available,
> or even Darwin 0.3 for i386.
>
>
>
> I wanted to take that IBM 4.4BSD and try to replace enough of 386BSD 0.1
> pl32 to have something more akin to ‘real’ 4.4 BSD.  Although I have a
> bunch of things I need to wrap up before I take that on (people are
> actually looking for bug fixes for Quake II on MS-DOS of all things….).
>
>
>
> I don’t think its exactly policed like 1984, although I think people are
> more excited about RIAA/MPAA than things like Unix.
>

Part of the problem too isn't so much who owns the copyrights, but whether
or not the copyrights for the
V7 and earlier actually exist and are valid. One of the reasons the BSD
suit was settled was at the time
the judge strongly telegraphed that there wasn't a valid copyright by
western union based on the copyright
law at its time of creation.... So even the question of who owns the unix
copyright might not be as simple
as all that... The stuff is so old, there's no money in removing any of the
ambiguity for the current copyright
holders (to the extent that it is valid), so we're left with a lot of
possibility, but no certainty. Though given the
Supreme Court's latest 'fair use' rulings, it wouldn't surprise me if were
it to wind up in court if that didn't
further weaken the answer to the point where it just doesn't matter what
the underlying details are, copying
and making a derived work would be OK. Though that's my own layman's best
guess...

Warner



> (shrug)
>
>
>
>
>
> *From: *Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com>
> *Sent: *Saturday, May 16, 2020 9:41 AM
> *To: *Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com>
> *Cc: *The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs at tuhs.org>
> *Subject: *Re: [TUHS] Status of Net/2
>
>
>
> On Friday, 15 May 2020 at 18:49:44 -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
>
> > What's the current status of net/2?
>
> >
>
> > I ask because I have a FreeBSD 1.1.5.1 CVS repo that I'd like to make
>
> > available. Some of the files in it are encumbered, though, and the
>
> > University of California has communicated that fact. But what does
>
> that
>
> > actually mean now that V7 has been released and that's what the files
>
> were
>
> > based on? Are they no longer encumbered?
>
>
>
> To the best of my knowledge, Net/2 would be covered by the license
>
> granted by Caldera on 23 January 2002:
>
>
>
>   Caldera International, Inc. hereby grants a fee free license that
>
>   includes the rights use, modify and distribute this named source
>
>   code, including creating derived binary products created from the
>
>   source code. The source code for which Caldera International,
>
>   Inc. grants rights are limited to the following UNIX Operating
>
>   Systems that operate on the 16-Bit PDP-11 CPU and early versions of
>
>   the 32-Bit UNIX Operating System, with specific exclusion of UNIX
>
>   System III and UNIX System V and successor operating systems:
>
>
>
>      32-bit 32V UNIX
>
>      16 bit UNIX Versions 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
>
>
>
> I'm attaching the PDF of the license agreement, along with an email
>
> from Dion Johnson to wkt (misspelt as wht) the following day.
>
>
>
> It doesn't specifically address any particular operating system, but
>
> it was my understanding that this would free all BSD versions.
>
>
>
> Greg
>
> --
>
> Sent from my desktop computer.
>
> Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key.
>
> See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
>
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>
> reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA
>
>
>
>
>
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