[TUHS] PWB 1.0 Distro and Licensing Timeframe

Jonathan Gray jsg at jsg.id.au
Sat Mar 11 21:12:38 AEST 2023


On Fri, Mar 10, 2023 at 01:24:26PM -0800, Warner Losh wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 10, 2023, 2:07 PM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
> 
> > The other really important piece is that the V7 redistribution license was
> > the first that allowed vendors to ship binaries, and this is all pre-Judge
> > Green.    The vendors started the negotiation for the replacement of the V7
> > license almost at day one [December 1979 was the first meeting at Ricki's
> > Hyatt - which I have described earlier].
> >
> 
> How did The Wollongong Group sell/send out the Interdata/Harris Unix Level
> 6 binaries then? Or did they get some kind of special since they bought the
> rights from Wollongong University?

That was commercially sold as a v7 port (in 1980) according to
Juris Reinfelds in
tuhs/Distributions/Other/Interdata/uow103747.pdf
"Price includes a binary license"
https://archive.org/details/login_october-1980/page/11/mode/2up

Human Computing Resources (HCR), were somewhat related to the University
of Toronto's Dynamic Graphics Project.  HCR first sold Xenix and later
UNITY?  Richard Miller worked at HCR and was involved with their port to
the NS16032 after the Interdata port
https://archive.org/details/1983-proceedings-unicom-san-diego/page/269/mode/2up

ISC were selling products based on v6 and PWB in 1977:
"By June he had formed Interactive Systems Corp. in Santa Monica,
Calif., and had a license from Bell Labs to market Unix-based systems.
...
The company calls its enhanced Unix systems Interactive System/One.
Interactive System/Two is coming along. It too is based on a Bell Labs
development.  This one, called Programmers Workbench (PWB), uses Unix
and makes it possible to develop software for large scale computers
using minis. Interactive has a license from Bell for PWB, similar to
the one it holds for Unix."
Datamation, November 1977, pg 189
https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_datamation_42830601/page/n179/mode/2up


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